When he arrived, he smelled badly.

Like garbage on a hot summer day of dogs and death.

When he first arrived, it took him a few days to remove his GoodWill coat. It was all he had.

The coat smelled badly, too.

The other boys eyed him warily.

“Are they gonna fuck me,” he asked.

“No. That’s not who we are.”

He did not believe it.

But no one exactly wanted to be anywhere near him.

The children you know are not the children I know. The children I know are not the children you know.

The children I know are not in awe of you.

They are afraid of you. Of what you can do. Your power.

You have been showing them your power all their lives. From day one.

Circumcision.

A reminder of what can be taken from you. That you are not powerful.

You can wrap it up under the rubrics of religion and medicine. But you are not powerful and they will cut you because it is their will.

The children I know are wary. They are wounded and they are ruined.

The children I know are seemingly impotent but for subterfuge.

Your children are from yet a harvest.

Mine are wind and seeds.

They are cunning and evasive. My children live in an abyss.

Your children your children are desire. My children are the prostitution of desire itself.

My children are depraved. Your children are depraved.

What we share is depravity. Whose children would have gonorrhea of the ass.

You did not know there was such a thing.

I have seen it a thousand times.

What I know is not what you know.

I am ruined. You are of a dire venom.

He didn’t eat much. They never do.

“I think there is something wrong with me,” he said.

The drive to the clinic is a long one.

Roll the windows down. The hot air blew in like screaming hyenas.

Something had to.

“I think my guts might explode.”

They did.

He cried.

I had packed an extra change of clothes for him. I thought his guts might explode.

I have cleaned up the likes of him and worse before.

The abused ones will shake.

He did.

He wondered if the people at the clinic would fuck him. “I highly doubt it.”

I wondered if he was ruined.

They are often ruined.

There is no hope for them.

The nice people hate hearing that.

But there is no hope for many of them, and that is how it is.

How many diseases can you have at one time. A few.

It was days before the smell was gone. 

I burned his coat.

I was told that the value of my neighbor’s property would drop.

Probably.

He wept in the shower so no one would hear him, but we all did.

It took him three years to talk about it.

And even then, he shook.

“They just used me,” he explained. “I dream about them. And something bad.”

“What something bad.”

“I miss them.”

He missed the people who had tormented him and broke him and he was ruined.

There is no hope for him. There just isn’t.

“They said they loved me.”

His body was covered in cigarette scars.

It. Just. Was.

The hopeful people do not do his laundry.

I do.

I do not want to hear any of their bullshit.

He will still go as long as a week before he speaks to a solitary soul.

He has only now learned how to ride a skateboard.

I keep expecting him to fall and break his neck.

But it hasn’t happened yet.

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