Retrospective [Part I]

We take I-5 heading north, intersecting the dilapidated houses, the car corkscrewing past the drunks who amble away into the night. When he steps outside, he walks on water, radiating pride as he floats toward the peeling paint, steady to the cadence of the electric hum of the power plant.1

Inside, the doorways missing doors leer at me like a gap-toothed smile, and the overhead lightbulb is bare-naked. I steady my footing on a rack of lit Christmas lights.2

“It’s September,” I say. He smiles. The rhythm of the power plant is making my bones quiver.3

His little brother, with a dark smudge of grease smeared across his forehead like war paint, howls violently, jumping up and down and shaking the furniture. We escape into his bedroom. 4

The ceiling is low, with one perfectly round hole above his bed, through which I can see his mother’s bedroom and the rafters above, cotton-candy fiberglass insulation the color of exposed gums at the dentist. The reeking, relentless scent of stale cigarette smoke mixes with the fresh aroma of menthol and tobacco. A small clump of ash sails through the hole in the ceiling, like a firefighter cruising down an imaginary pole, and lands on the sagging mattress with a sizzle. Surrounding the circumference of the gap, cracks have formed in thin, haphazard veins; they remind me of cancer: malignant, slowly seeping to infiltrate every pure cell. 5

He carefully squeezes a thin line of goo from a fading tube of Preparation H and rubs onto the purple bags under his eyes, juxtaposed against his pallid, translucent skin. He tells me how it makes them fade. He has crows’ feet, at thirteen. I look into his dirty mirror at my own skin, still tan from summer, untainted by the scars of pubescent acne.6

I sit on the mattress and look out the one window, which looks out over a sad-looking mire; the ghost of a garden. He lies on top of me with his head on my heart and I inhale that familiar organic smell of skin and Dial antibacterial soap. I can still hear the traffic on I-5, over the heartbeat in my ears. His kisses are sloppy and I teach myself to breathe through my nose, suffocated by the weight of his tongue. He reaches clumsily down to my groin, fumbles with my belt. I groan audibly the way they always do in porn and flick my eyes back in my sockets as though I’m in ecstasy. 7

He runs his long fingers up and down my arms, the digits like an arachnid exploring my skin, waiting to pounce. Whenever I went outdoors, I had to spray myself from head to toe with insect repellant, or else I came back swollen with mosquito bites on my ankles, calves, arms. My mother would smile and squat down to my level, applying aloe vera to the circular red lumps.8

“They love you, Sam,” she said as she dusted my wounds with a cotton ball that was laden with some sort of cooling magic and I winced at the sensation. “Your blood tastes so sweet to them.” She playfully bit at my skin and I recoiled at the idea and swore to eat only bitter things so my blood would turn as acrid as black coffee.9

When he and I are middle-aged, I wonder, will we apply our own remedy to the abrasions of our own children, to one another?10