erg.
strays
for myr
You are an orphan.
That’s the story you were told, anyway. Some kids have moms and dads and some kids don’t, and it’s not bad luck, it’s just the way things are.
When you were six, you asked to see their bodies.
You’re still waiting.
As a foster kid, you kept getting in trouble, gouging the walls with forks, throwing rocks, cursing in school. They shuffled you around like a deck of cards, trying to find somewhere where you fit. Some of the people you lived with were nice, others not so. Along the way, you learned to read and steal and take a punch, escape out the window to sleep on a neighbor’s lawn. You heard from under staircases, around corners, “There’s something seriously wrong with that boy.”
You thought that sounded right. Some kids are good and some kids are bad, and it’s not your fault, you were made like this. You couldn’t sit still. You dreamt about bats with teeth longer than your fingers, holey leather wings slashing papercuts all the way down to the bone. Seven years old and you were terrified all the time, your heart worn and tired from beating so hard.
The second-to-last home, you set your little twin bed on fire, because you were cold, because it was too dark, because this is how you are. There was plastic covering the mattress, crackling under the sheets, and you stood in the doorway too long, watching it burn, breathing in the fumes.
You woke up in the hospital again.
Your parents weren’t really dead, you thought, staring at the green world out your window, wondering if these scars on your arms would ever go away. They’d been lying to you your whole life. You’d never seen any bodies.
It was spring.
A man came to visit you sometimes, after it got dark outside and you were scared. You refused to speak to him, jaw locked, thin peeling arms crossed like swords on your chest. He didn’t seem to notice, pulling up a chair and eating sandwiches wrapped in white paper, guessing wrong answers to Jeopardy. He brought you Kit-Kats, drawn from his coat pockets, orange-red on the outside and silver on the inside. You always waited until after he left to eat them, though it was hard.
He told you about his son.
Eric.
On your eighth birthday, the man brought you home with him, your arms still bandaged. You had yet to say a word to him, hunched up against the door of his pretty green Cadillac, clinging to the silver handle and wondering if you dove and rolled, would you survive?
The son, Eric, was doing homework in front of cartoons, messy black hair like the time you snapped a whole box of pens open on the carpet, one at a time. He looked up and grinned, gap-toothed. You hated him on sight.
It was your fifth foster home in a year, and you wanted matches or knives. Rocks and silverware. You were underfed and your eyes took up most of your face, dirty hands, all your clothes too big or too small. Cesar gave you the top bunk, rocket-ship sheets stiff with cheap detergent, a small shelf hammered into the wall. Eric slept easily beneath you, and you lay awake in the red devil glow of the night light, dying to claw off the new skin on your arms, black ropes around your mind, the evil within.
You carved up the walls, your initials because they were the only thing in the world that belonged to you and you alone. Eric fixed you a bowl of cereal, so sweet you cried out when you crunched into it, and you flung the bowl against the cabinets. Shatter of milk and ceramic and Eric’s face, clean and stunned, eyes and mouth circled. You tore his comic books into confetti, drove your fists into the bedposts until your hands were bloody and Eric wrestled you to the ground, sat on your chest and wouldn’t move until his dad came home.
Cesar kept saying, you’re not getting rid of us, and you laughed right in his face.
You never got rid of anybody. It was something that was done to you, every time without fail, and you wished they would stop pretending they were different.
It was never different.
Eric’s mother had died slowly the year before, but you didn’t believe that any more than you believed that your own mother would abandon you, leave without even a memory or a photograph left behind. You hit him in the mouth, on the grass at the beginning of summer, and shouted at him, show me the body.
Later, up on the roof with the moon crowding into your lungs, you could hear him crying to Cesar, I hate him, he’s ruining everything, please, dad, please.
You waited to be sent away again.
It almost killed you.
Cesar sent you to your room when you broke all the windows, but he picked the glass out of your hands first. There was a cut healing on Eric’s lip, dark line making his smile pained and crooked. You stole seventy-eight dollars from Cesar’s wallet and dropped each crumpled bill down the sewer, confessed it proudly over spaghettios and salad. Cesar shook his head, looking down, and wouldn’t let you watch television for a week.
You were so confused.
When you woke up screaming, pinwheeling your fists against the night wings, Eric ran and got his dad and his dad lifted you out of the top bunk, bundled you in his arms. You cried yourself out against his chest, trying to work a good enough angle to kick him in the stomach. Eric knelt beside the two of you in the bottom bunk, petting your hair. It was dark in there, Eric’s uncertain hand on the back of your neck.
At the end of summer, you found a book of matches on the sidewalk and put them in your pocket.
On the first day of fourth grade, you were fighting in the yard, losing, outnumbered. They kicked you in the ribs and you fell, scooping dirt into your hands to grind into their eyes once you got back to your feet, once you could breathe again. Suddenly Eric was there, flying like a dream onto one of their backs, white teeth gnashing and his heels digging in.
You lost anyway.
Bleeding on the ground, Eric gasped softly; you could feel him shaking. Your eye was swelling and your mouth felt unnaturally thick. You wanted badly to thank him, cover the broken places on his body with your hands, swear your allegiance. You’d never fought with someone else on your side.
Cesar cleaned you up when you got home, hot bite of iodine on your cheek, and he made you sandwiches, sent you both to your room for fighting.
It hurt to talk, so you ate in silence, sitting on the floor with your backs against the bunk. Eric kept looking at you like he was scared you’d attack him next, which was fair, you supposed.
He fell asleep before the sun went down, curled up with his fists tucked under his chin. You did his homework for him, the split skin over your knuckles reopening, smearing on the paper.
You started eating with him at lunch, playing army men in the shorn grass. It was months before you spoke to him again, your throat winched and your lungs punctured. He had a million things to say, and you just wanted to sit cross-legged next to him, not daring to disturb the pretty quiet that was growing inside you.
Eventually, though, his lack of elementary strategy got the best of you, and you told him in a whisper, they can’t attack from the north, there’s no cover if they need to retreat.
He cocked his head at you, skinny fingers motionless on the grass. You swallowed hard, wanting to touch the scar on his lip and like magic, you could fix this.
Eric smiled, called you crazy. If they attack from the north, they won’t need to retreat.
For Christmas, you got a red and silver bike and a little yellow radio and twenty-seven Kit-Kats. You and Eric started exploring the creeks, muddied and blasting each other with the hose in the yard before Cesar would let you in the house. You did Eric’s reading and he did your math, every night in the bent gold spread of the desk lamp. Cesar built a ladder up to the roof because you still went up there sometimes, when the stuff inside your head got too loud. Sometimes, Eric came with you.
It was spring again.
On your birthday, Cesar asked if it would be okay if he adopted you. He explained, I’ll be your dad and Eric will be your brother and this will be your family.
You ran away for the first time that night.
You got as far as the highway overpass, the soles of your sneakers flapping against the ground, grime screwed into your socks. You’d shoplifted slim-jims and candy from the Circle-K, and you ate them for dinner in the sick dark, your stomach aching from salt and sugar and the smell of exhaust. The cars above sounded like a tornado; you imagined yourself safe, buried far underground.
You didn’t need a new family. Your parents were still out there somewhere, they were probably looking for you, scared to death that you were hurt or cold or frightened.
You were so frightened.
The police found you at dawn, wrapped up around Eric’s backpack, tear tracks clear through the dirt on your face. You kicked and bit and clawed and they brought you home.
Eric was on the front steps, in his pajamas. His eyes were sunk back, face as pale as cream. The sight of him in the pink light hurt your chest. You scrubbed your hands on your jeans and got out of the car, blinking fast against the rising sun and the dive of your stomach, thinking what if you’d never seen him again.
He caught you right before you fell.
Three days later, you were adopted.
The cluttered ranch house grew old around you. Your initials in the wood got smooth and yellowed. Eric and you shared clothes, made blowtorches out of WD-40 and the book of matches that you used to carry around just in case, melting army men and trying to light tinfoil on fire. You had a blue pup tent permanently set up in the backyard, under the rope-swing tree, where you slept in matching sleeping bags, side by side. Weekends at the shore, afternoons in the parking lot of the Circle-K, and he was a diversion while you lifted candy and gum. The two of you were the perfect crime.
You had a best friend. You had a brother.
Eric called you ‘stray,’ though Cesar didn’t like the name at all and always yelled at him when he said it. Eric told you in the pup tent, his face creased with frustration, it’s not an insult, strays are good, they follow you home. He asked you wide-eyed, you don’t mind, dude, do you?
You didn’t. Eric’s hair rustled and zipped on the vinyl of the tent, his legs folded up like pocketknives on the shiny puff of the sleeping bag. The sun was going down and it bled through all orange and blue and diffused, washing over Eric from behind.
You called him Ricky.
Eric took care of you. Sometimes you still wanted to put your fist through a window or pour gasoline on the carpet, but Eric was there to hold you back, calm you down. He made you promises that couldn’t be kept, and you stored them up like fuel for the winter, your sleeves packed with aces.
For your fourteenth birthday, Cesar gave you a silver watch with your name, and Cesar’s name, and Eric’s name, all engraved on the back. You wanted to cry, feeling like you’d been lost at sea. You drove your teeth into your lower lip, heavy cool links around your fingers and candlelight, Eric asking, where the hell is my fancy watch, making you laugh instead.
There were whole months that went past without the bat dream, without you wondering what your parents were doing right now.
When you were fifteen, you went bad again.
The handcuffs were Eric’s idea. He ordered them out of the back of a comic book, real-live genuine police-issue. They took six to eight weeks to come and by that time it was summer. You were out of school, still trying to work the rules of parallel lines out of your brain, and in the park, you hooked the handcuffs out of Eric’s back pocket and snapped one over his wrist, snapped the other over your own.
You were just playing. Eric was your prisoner, metal shining and sweat-slick around his wrist. He tripped you when you called him a serial killer, and you both hit the grass. You rolled and pinned him, knees on his shoulders, him red-faced and laughing beneath you.
An hour or two later, it became clear that the key had been lost somewhere in transit. You looked until nightfall, combing your fingers through the grass, walking your bikes back with your eyes on the asphalt, retracing your steps. Eric’s arm was up against yours, and you kept thinking that this was the solution you’d been looking for, this was how you could make sure you weren’t left behind again.
Cesar laughed until he started to cough, one hand over his eyes. Boys, he said, grinning at you, think you’re on your own here.
Eric was shouting, some help you are, and you wanted to sling an arm around his neck and calm him down, but couldn’t figure out how to do it without dislocating a shoulder.
You slept out in the tent that night, out of necessity for once, and you stayed up for a long time, talking. Eric kept forgetting and trying to scratch his nose or push his hair back, your strung hand bonking into his face. He blamed you for everything, but didn’t sound mad. The crickets eked away at the silence outside, the occasional car washing past.
You dreamt that night of the bats, shivering and jerking, ring of metal like teeth, but then something changed. Eric showed up in handcuffs, his hands glowing, and he smiled at you, said, don’t be scared, no retreat, and looped his arms around your neck, kissed you on the mouth.
You awoke gasping.
The replacement key came in the mail on Monday, after you’d spent a strange, joyful weekend with Eric constantly and literally at hand. He’d napped on the couch in front of the television with his head near your leg, his arm back and your curled hands resting together on your leg, as you kept perfectly still. There were identical red marks on both of your wrists, your skin tinting softly green, which Cesar told you meant there was copper in the cuffs.
And you dreamt of Eric, again and again.
Freed, you tried to stay away, chased into corners once more by the evil within. You were being tested. It wasn’t possible that this was real, that this could have happened to you on top of everything else. It would go away if you just fixed your mind somewhere else, if you stayed away.
It wasn’t fair. You couldn’t stand to look at him, his handsome face and the way he was getting taller by the hour, his shoulders filling out, his hands suddenly long and wide. His back as smooth as glass, the new dark on his face, how he looked in the bathroom with the door open, shaving without a shirt on.
You were going straight to hell.
But that was something you’d known for years.
Eric thought he’d done something wrong, climbed into your top bunk and apologized without knowing what for, and you held your knees to your chest, eyes locked on the red nightlight. It’s nothing, you’re okay, I swear, you told him, and he looked blank and sad and the set of his mouth fell. He rolled one shoulder, if you say so, man, and climbed back down, wrecking you with a worried backwards glance.
It was a long year. Eric hung back and treated you like crystal. You appreciated it, fragile in the brace of your mind and the close of your hands. He was everything, all you could think about. He was funny and kind and had slept soundlessly in the bunk beneath you even when you were pyromaniacal, homicidal. He was your second chance, and you were fucking it up, worse every day.
You’d had seven years. It was far more than you deserved.
You took to sleeping in the pup tent without him, the flashlight on until the batteries sputtered and gave, still scared of the dark, and then one night.
Then one night Eric stumbled in, weak on his feet, and your stomach hurt, the sight of his face, what if you never.
You pushed that aside. He demanded of you, what’d I do, let me fix it, kneeling on the sleeping bag with his hands in fists on his legs. The yellow light was in his eyes, a high skinny knifepoint of night sky, the opening of the tent flap, jabbing out of his shoulder. He said, whatever it is, I take it back.
It was almost summer again, fireworks in the western sky, rolling heat in here with the two of you. Your heart hollowed out, because he said, please. You put your hand on the side of his neck and touched your lips to his, something terrible careening downward between your bodies, his flat shock and then all at once his arms around you, his mouth open.
You had a best friend. He’d never really been your brother.
Eric was as surprised as you were. He slid his hands down your chest, black-eyed, and asked, really? And you shook your head, arching your back.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
You loved him so much it made you sick.
He was right there with you. You were waiting for the bats to return, stuck like glue on the idea of him with his perfect mouth, skidding your shirt up with the heels of his hands, holding your hair out of your eyes with his forearm. Sixteen years old and that meant everything you tried was for the first time, and you felt like you’d invented it.
The house was yours during the day, the tent at night. Trigger-shot, you soon knew nothing as well as you knew this, smug and expert, waiting for Eric to catch his breath with your fingers twisted in the cup of his hip.
You spent the summer like that, biting your lip until there was a cut that matched the scar on Eric’s, picking blades of grass out of his hair. His skin tasted like salt; he was learning to surf. It was hard to breathe the air, but that was okay.
He was in the sun, black and tan on blue, and you could not quite understand how much he meant to you. The light slammed off the silver of your watch, which you never took off, and he swam back to the shore, told you he’d seen your reflection from a hundred yards out.
You loved him so much you almost couldn’t bear it.
It was like that for almost two years, Eric pulling you into the bottom bunk, kissing you at stoplights, wrapping his legs around your waist and pushing on your shoulders, come on, come on.
In the fall, you looked at him sleeping in the shotgun seat, waiting in line to cross the border, and you couldn’t take it, you shook him awake. He blinked dazedly, unsure in the sodium lights, and you told him then, with the sirens and car horns exploding around you, I love you. I am in love with you. You are every good thing in the world.
And he yawned, said, I know, man, obviously. Love you too. Shut up.
And he went back to sleep.
All the bad stuff that happened to you, your parents who might be dead or maybe only deserted you, whichever is worse, your nightmares and the fires you’ve set, the cracks and chasms, the bats that claw through your dreams, and it was worth it. People didn’t come more damaged than you were, but Eric loved you in spite of it, or because of it. Whichever was worse.
You were so happy.
Almost two years, twenty-three months, passed like you’d been pushed out of a plane. You were fixed. Eric kicked you under the table and skipped the SATs with you, spent the day down at the creeks with stolen beer and no hope for the future. He was carved into you, his initials above yours in the wood of the doorframe.
A few weeks before you graduated, Cesar walked in on the two of you, in the bottom bunk, tied together like vines. He was supposed to be somewhere else, didn’t really matter where or why he was home early, he saw you together, Eric’s legs over your shoulders, your hands around his wrists.
Stop-motion, lightning at the window, the wedge of light from the door cast across the both of you like a malformed spotlight, and Cesar frozen with shock. Eric shoved you off him, his heel clocking hard into your jaw and making your head spin. Cesar began to shout. Eric cried out, no, no, bits of your hair wound in his fingers.
Your life crashing down.
Cesar screamed at you, I let you into this house, and that was true. You got up on trembling legs and you couldn’t look at either of them, hearing Eric as he started to weep, begging forgiveness. You grabbed Eric’s backpack and spilled the papers and notebooks out of it, moving mechanically, your mouth tasting like ash. You were shaking so hard. Eric clutched at your arm and you threw him back, shoving clothes into the backpack, your vision whiting out as Cesar thundered, no son of mine.
That was true too.
Eric kept saying you didn’t have to go, kept saying, I’m sorry, over and over until you didn’t know who he was talking to. You didn’t look at him, his hands clenched in your shirt, his sweaty hair brushing your face.
Cesar had disappeared, though you could hear things crashing in the kitchen, thinking about the destructiveness that still boiled up in you when you saw plate glass and things that were flammable, when your heart was breaking as fast as it was right then.
You’d been given everything.
Eric was crying so hard you were afraid he’d hurt himself, blood red in his eyes, but you couldn’t do anything about it. Eric was screaming, dad tell him he doesn’t have to leave, kicking holes in the wall, and you couldn’t breathe.
Unable to process the sheer weight of the pain that you were in, you somehow made the front door with Eric hanging on your shoulders, your hand numb around the strap of the backpack. You couldn’t help it, turning in the hallway and putting your arms around him as tight as you could without breaking his ribs. You might have broken one or two anyway, or maybe they were your own. You buried your face in his shoulder. He was mumbling, no, choking.
You let him go.
You left.
You’d been given everything, and there was destruction in your wake. Your parents hadn’t died by accident; you must have killed them. You’d killed Eric and Cesar, a timebomb for nine years, just casualties now. You ruined everything you touched.
You could never go back there.
You hitched north to Los Angeles, feeling Eric recede from you like you were being skinned by inches. Three weeks before you were supposed to graduate high school, and now you were homeless, unknown, bruises rising on your body, misery washing over you black and thick.
Sleeping on front porches and in shelters, the bats returned, worse now, bigger. You couldn’t fight them off. You stole food and liquor, wandering the bright streets feeling fractured, splinters in every bone. You thought about Eric all the time, through the endless summer, the terrible fall.
The first time a guy offered you money for a blowjob, you’d been up for several days. You didn’t think about it, going to your knees on the concrete. It hadn’t rained for months, but there were still damp circles on your jeans when you rose.
This was your life now. Some people can be redeemed and some can’t, and you were just a kid with a hole blown in your chest, dirty-kneed and slouching in doorways, scrubbing your face clean in public bathrooms. Sometimes you wanted to die, but mostly it was just a job.
Sometimes you thought maybe you were already dead.
In March, you were horrifically beaten in an alley and they stole your watch.
It was just another spring.
*
if you're at all interested
Well! That certainly got out of hand.
All right, you guys. Stay safe, and happy, and warm. It's a long winter, you know.