The bad men sat me down on the prairie ground. The prairie ground was soft, and I didn’t like it. It almost felt like the YMCA pool back home – thick and thin at the same time, wet and cool and warm and bad. The saliva and semen of millions. I started screaming and the bad men pinned me down. They used thumb tacks and soy gum erasers, and scraped razor blades against glass. I looked at the sky and the sun was directly above me, smiling over a collection of dying trees. It was 4PM, my favorite autumn hour.
Being a boy of seven, I let the bad men do what they needed to do. I was small and my brain was undeveloped and soft. The bad men were strong and their skin was smooth and greasy, tanned and complete. They were real adult men who had had years to make their bodies just the way they wanted them. Their legs and veins were perfected and sculpted like the snowmen grandma and I used to make in the side yard.
The prairie ground felt more disgusting than ever as I drifted into a chaotic sleep.
My dreams were extremely realistic, more realistic than my waking days ever seemed. When I awoke, I was perched on a river bed. A little water was getting into my mouth and eyes, but I could handle it. Things were starting to hurt, but I could handle it. I watched a beaver and his mama put hickory nuts into a watery sack.
The moon came out and the night did, too, and I was left with no one. The bad men were gone, and I was getting wetter and wetter. The world was turning into a painful water castle.
As I died, all I could think of was mother and her pearls, and the little loose plank in the attic where I kept my marbles and goose feathers.
