Crying at Christmas

By John Q Stenson

A novel of heartbreak and love

In the sadness of life, love is a constant that tears at us and promises p

• Language: English
• Publisher: JQStensonPress
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734947809

John Q Stenson

John trained as an architect and pursued a successful career in the field for several years. However, he always wrote during those years of school and work. Driven by an internal restlessness, and inspired by finding someone whose passing comment summarized a shared trauma of childhood - 'no matter what hopes I had, everything always led to crying at Christmas' - John wrote the first seven of his chapters freehand in an ordinary, spiral themed-notebook. The story took over from there, taking him where it would until reaching the conclusion it must. John continues to write and live his life the same way. Each moment brings the next unknown moment, yet all take him to the conclusion they must.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter One – Xmas, 1

Chapter Two – Best Friend, 1

Chapter Three – Xmas, 2

Chapter Four – Dream, 1

Chapter Five – Xmas, 3

Chapter Six – Best Friend, 2

Chapter Seven – Sister, 1

Chapter Eight – Dream, 2

Chapter Nine – Xmas, 4

Chapter Ten – Best Friend, 3

Chapter Eleven – Sister, 2

Chapter Twelve – Best Friend, 4

Chapter Thirteen – Xmas, 5

Chapter Fourteen – Best Friend, 5

Chapter Fifteen – Sister, 3

Chapter Sixteen – Best Friend, 6

Chapter Seventeen – Dream, 3

Chapter Eighteen – Best Friend, 7

Chapter Nineteen – Sister, 4

Chapter Twenty – Best Friend, 8

Chapter Twenty-one – Sister, 5

Chapter Twenty-two – Best Friend, 9

Chapter Twenty-three – Xmas, 6

Chapter Twenty-four – Brother, 1

Chapter Twenty-five – Best Friend, 10

Chapter Twenty-six – Brother, 2

Chapter Twenty-seven – Best Friend, 11

Chapter Twenty-eight – Best Friend, 12

Twenty-nine – Dream, Chapter 4

Chapter Thirty – Brother, 3

Chapter Thirty-one – Brother, 4

Chapter Thirty-two – Brother, 5

Chapter Thirty-three – Xmas, 7

Chapter Thirty-four – Dream, 5

Chapter Thirty-five – Sister, 6

Chapter Thirty-six – Brother, 6

Chapter Thirty-seven – Quiet

About the Author

To Brian:

I am sure this is what you said. Thank you.

Chapter One – Xmas, 1

When you are seven-and-a-half on Christmas morning, you have the possibility to have the happiest day of your life.

I woke up so early the sun had not yet risen, the moon had run to the secreted otherworld, and only the flare of stars cast shadows through the uncurtained upper windows.  My stuffed bear had escaped from beneath the covers during the night, but he had not yet steeled himself up to leap from the bed and cavort toward the door.  He thus lay mutely, his one, remaining eye watching me, half-torn between sleep and a trip across the floor.  The star shadows multiplied about him and mapped out spectral compositions, types, and red shifts.  I could see that everything was moving away from him and me; growing smaller; at least that is how it appeared to me at that age and moment.

As my other senses sharpened, I began to construe the members of my sleeping family.  Across the hall I heard the meek squeaking of my older sister.  I adored her.  She knew everything.  She made me laugh.  She took on my troubles.  At times I gave them to her.  Later in life I would regret my gifts when I, like each of us in the family, began to assume guilt and responsibility for her terrorizations.  For now, she was my favorite person, and for now, I could still hear her escaping breaths.  At seven-and-a-half my hearing was so acute that I could hear the scratching of bed sheets on pajama flannel as she forced the corrupted air out of her body.  I did not make out that morning that one day she would finally fully succeed at expelling that faint breath.  I only heard the certainty that she was not awake, not yet conscious enough to decide if she should inhale again.

From the second bedroom down the hall, the corner chamber with the wicked maple who stood sentry outside and who was always reaching to get inside, I heard and sensed our older brother.  On that side of the house the starlight was reluctant to glimmer for fear its vibrancy would be bent into paths not of its own nature.  It would shimmer through curtains sometimes, or taunt the maple by slipping between its bare winter branches to dapple the sparse, almost dead, rime-covered grass, but it was not winning against the darkness.  It was only an imaginary animation, dependent upon cold, clear winter nights, leafless, quiescent branches, and grass encased in frozen hoar that evaporated with the light and warmth of the resplendent, incorrigible, altruistic sun.  I loved my brother – I had to.  He was the darkness made manifest, formed by the same forces shaping me.  I had to love my close enemy in whatever guise he was presented.

Behind the only sealed bedroom door in the house I felt the source of all worldly power.  I could not move; it was Christmas morning – possibly the happiest day of my life.  If my bear jumped from the bed, there would be questions as to why I was making such a racket at such an hour.  If my sister whimpered too loudly in her nightmarish half-life, my mother would have to run to her to smother the escaping disquietude.  If my brother tossed or turned in that crypt-like room of his, my father would have to visit again and exorcise the demons reanimating the dormant fiend.  I had to lie still.  Only in that brace could Christmas be all that everyone promised it would be.  Any motion would propel the power of my father into a whirlpool of destruction.  We would all be pulled into the abyss.  Down, but never to a restful bed.  Just wrenched about, then left beaten by the current, left flailing for safety, left to gasp for air, tossed and turned in the swirls, eventually surreptitiously and instinctually pulling ourselves towards a sweet, hypnotic, healing calm.

I could not actually hear, see, nor sense any rustlings from my mother from behind that closed door.  It required faith to believe she continued to lie quietly there.  The dark vortex around which her life revolved obscured anything and anyone.  The blackness was large enough for two and starker in that concealing, binary relationship.  Lightness of being was opposed and perverted into veils that spun and wrapped themselves about others, binding them, mummifying them over time.  I would hear her singing when she was not so close to him.  It sometimes seeped through the wrappings; it would draw us to safety.  This night there were no sounds.  On this great birthday of my savior there was a silence on par with death.  Maybe having to be quiet was how Jesus could be born into our lives.  From imposed stillness the most joyous of events could resurrect for another year.  I was right to be still.  If I were as meek as my bear, as blanketed in a dark, velvet dream as my sister, as mortified as my brother, yet as quieted as my mother, I could witness Jesus through the lens of power that viewed and magnified our small beings into adulthood.

How brightly would he burn?  How illuminating would his presence be?  Would our family's tree be completed?  My father had gotten as far as stringing the lights around it, and my mother and we kids had ornamented it, but in that short interlude when my father had gone to reward himself for his stupendous work, he had drowned the momentum to stand high on a chair and top his efforts.  He could not crown the evergreen with the electric, five-watt, angel star.  When we said that we would do it, he said it was the father's place to execute such a task.  The paterfamilias was to lead and we were not to touch the glorious, high light under any circumstance.  He was quite capable of doing this masterful task.  There were no places for usurpers and there was certainly no place for a pansy-assed, crybaby like me to attempt something so splendid.  He said that maybe someday, if I grew up straight and true like this specimen had, I might be able to claim the right to perform this consummate act, but that was only if I turned away from my fairyland aberrancies.

When my brother laughed and said look who's calling the kettle black, my sister gasped out her breath, my mother sank into her chair, and I ran up the stairs leading from the room.  I reached the top of them; in a quietly, stellar position to watch, one eye closed, the fisted places from where the dark bruises would soon steal the lightness of my brother's wan skin.  But there was no blackening.  Instead my father careened over to the star, grabbed and raised its icy, glittering ephemerality above his head – crowning his ambitions – and hurled the emblem earthward.  The unfurled wings of the angel, who offered the raised star in supplicatory hands held high above its head, could neither slow their descent nor keep them in heaven's boughs.  The material, porcelain fragility of the wings was the star’s and angel's undoing.  A Lord’s Supper count of major pieces flew about.  Constellations of miniscule slivers formed a halo cloud then settled into a dusting on the cheap linoleum floor and my father's impervious work boots.  He spun to my mother and told her she needed to learn how to keep a clean house.  He turned away toward my brother and said you caused this, help her clean up the mess.  He did not even face my sister but muttered that if she did not stop her whiny wheezing he would see if some time outside in the cold fresh air, aided by being coatless, would not clear up her rale.  Then he looked upwards at me and said you are not above all of this although you think you might be; you need to learn a lesson.  He stepped out of the debris field.  I stood inert as stone in expectation of his approach, but instead he sidled over to the magnetic bar, poured a quadruple – one shot for each of us, his captivated kin – and shook the rattled ice, which soothing familiarity settled him into a cheap, caressing lazy chair.  I looked back toward my mother, kneeling on command.  Her sweeping hand motions erased the outlined footprints created by the chaotically settled slivers.  No broom, no dustpan.  She has always said that nothing takes up the fine particles of glass like soft, dampened skin.  The particles cling to each other, and when the skin is broken the delicate bleeding can be used to bind the small irritants together and impel them into a discardable rag, a rag which she defensively keeps close to her and uses to defragment her oft stained hands.  She would brush my father's neck with the same ridding motions.  Human beings are versatile and adaptable.  I heard a duet of scraping and gasping from my parents' room that evening.  That went on for three days and two nights.  That third night my father sobered up enough to apply his instructive punishment to me.

I need Jesus to come to our house this Christmas, this morning.  When he does, I'll be ready.  I'll go wherever he takes me – up to heaven, down to hell: here on earth.  He will give me empyreal wings: I shall not be broken.

Uh, oh.  I am not breathing.  The blood seeping through my veins slows as each second passes.  If I breathe the stillness will shatter.  Into my room will come the heavy footsteps and clumsy hands of my lord.  Oh, no.  I see no possibility of release.  The exhalation will be explosive and up he'll jump.  Oh, God.  He would rouse my mother.  Then she would have to pretend she were still asleep, unaware of his comings and goings.  Oh, woe.  Why is muddy darkness suffusing through my room, and why are the sharp star shadows and iridescent black castings fading, being replaced by swirling clots of light sluggishly sloshing through my own mind's making?  Oh, oh…

What has happened?  Bear is looming over me.  Is he trying to draw the breath out of me?  Am I being smothered with attention?  Where is the starlight that so comfortingly clips through my upper windows?

There.

There it is.

There it was.  I saw glimmerings, halos of stars, and crowns of sparkling constellations nearing, circling, enveloping, clustering, and limning the contours of power as they drew away from me, upwards, heavenwards.  It was quiet again, I could breathe, there was Eos' essence dulling the cut glass windowpanes' edges.  Rectangles of newly washed skies hovered above me, feebly late, yet liberating, freeing me from the phantasmagoric emptiness that solidified in the near-pitch night.  I shifted and saw my bed covers simulate my movements.  From one eye I saw my bear lying face down on the floor, pressed down with what seemed to be the residual outline of a boot print in the small of his back.  He had not fled.  I turned in place and with two white, wide-open eyes surveyed the Christmas morning coming to lighten my room.  There were no other objects of affection to attend to, and I peered toward and beyond the door opening.  My sister was resuscitated.  I heard her anticipation of what was about to transpire in the frictive resistance of the sheets and blankets cocooning her.  She twitch-kicked the sheet, pointedly loosening the night's weavings.  There was a will there and off came the topmost blanket, off came the bedspread and the sheer blanket.  There was only a thin cowl now constraining her in place.

In the generosity of that Christmas morning of giving I sought not to trouble her and jettisoned the full set of covers from my body, my body from the bed, and, as my feet landed on the floor, my bear from his ignobility.  He burst up into the air, then like magic into my one hand, but I released him, my attention elsewhere.  The house quivered beneath the fuzzy poom of my touchdown, and as my first step after sticking the dismount struck the floor there was an answering squish from my sister's self-ejection from her bed that dampened the tremor.  We were enmeshed in our timing – I one step ahead – our encounter in the hall was a symmetrical counter-weaving motion.  I tilted right on my step and she tilted left on hers.  We rocked and rocketed down the stairs and turned the corner at the stair landing, her hand placement below mine, but equally purposeful and assured.  Then six risers later, taken in two bounds, we landed on the cleaned family room floor and leapt like wild lions before wary presents whose skins were artfully selected to conceal, and who were wrapped and herded according to the recipient's name upon the tree's boundary-drawing skirt and under its sheltering, spread arms.  The savannah of linoleum was about to become the plains of carnage.  Bows would fly, foils splay defenseless, shielding papers atomize under the grasp of tearing, rending hands windmilling all upwards into clouds of littering particles that would fall calculatedly, outlining the kneeling forms of we two assailants.  Crime scene tape connecting the dots around those voids would mark not the victims' final resting places, but the perpetrators' sites of assault.

Done.

No one else has come downstairs.  We sat and examined each other and our gifts.  There were certainly no others for us, no surprises.  As usual, our mother had sorted and arranged each of her children's gifts into piles uniquely suited for us.  This year mine had been set crook-shaped, a reference to this past year's broken arm and cast.  As we sat winded, recharging, I felt again the pain that I had borne that July Fourth.  It was as sharp in its intensity as it had been that day, but I could not remember the moment of fracture.  I recalled running through the living room into the kitchen, and next my father lifting me up, saying, Here Boy, you look pained.  Too much running around indoors will do that to you.  There was more, much more, a lot of questions, but I had had to remain silent, unreflective of that instant when I had broken across the threshold and seen nothing I could positively describe.  As I sat here now, I felt the crack of pain anew, but also the staccato release of it with each panted breath.  I hoped that my sister saw none of that, but as I looked her way, I watched her draw one arm toward her other and stroke it gently with her hand.

Mom remembered, you know, she said.  We were silent several seconds.  Does it still hurt?  I saw you flinch, she removed her hand from her arm and began to reach for mine.

I did knowingly flinch.  She paused.  It hurt, I answered.  "It does sometimes, but I try not to run in the house anymore.  This morning I couldn't help myself.  I had to run here.  I think this has to be the happiest day of my life.  Mom remembering and setting the gifts out in the bent shape of my cast wasn't her fault.  She tries.  She tried for you."

Yes, she did.  You see it?

Yes, a 'B.’  You got a 'B' last term in math.  That's your first 'B' since fourth grade.  She got it right, didn't she?

Yes, she did.  If it weren't for that grade though, I don't know what she would have done.  I do not remember anything good from the past year.  Just trouble and…and… and her hand, which had half reached me, continued its direction and lightly touched the very spot of my fracture.

What?  What is it?  I… I too lost my will to speak.

She whispered, Mike.  Christmas morning swelled around us.  Silent house, hushed occupants.  Holy terror he was.  Dead calm these days.  Nothing was right.  He had begun glowering at my father this year.  Our father called him 'Mama's boy.'  But he had stopped being a boy this year, and he muttered mild epithets under his breath; pin pricks directed at our father figure.  The 'boy' was still asleep upstairs.  He would be so for what seemed like forever, for what seemed like a peace of eternity on Christmas morning.  Mom had said he was going through changes – changes we all would experience some day.  I thought of him just then as Michael, the name as it would appear on his headstone.

I said, Michael.

My sister giggled.  We both looked over to his gift horde.  It looked like our mother had arranged his gifts in the shape of an 'M,' a capital 'M.'  Did it stand for 'Michael,' or was it a reference to his becoming a Man?  Monster, she giggled some more.  Little monster, she whispered.  That was our behind-his-back nickname for him.  Do you think Mom knows we call him that?

I shrugged.  I don't know.  If she doesn't know, she will.  She always learns these things.  Do you remember when she told you that morning that wearing your underwear inside out was unhygienic and that if you persisted in doing it, you would be exposing yourself to germs that were otherwise trapped on the outside of clothing?  My sister looked pained and withdrew her hand from my arm, but nodded, ‘Yes.’  I never told her you were doing that and that I was wearing my underwear inside out too.  She just knew and she knew I was doing it as well because she looked over at me after scolding you and scrunched her left eye at me.

I know.  I know you did not tell her.  So, I guess she knows we call him little monster behind his back, and she will tell us someday, somehow to stop.  But he is a little monster.

A big monster sometimes.

We sat then.  We listened for warning sounds from upstairs; maybe a growl, or a bump.  There was only the dead quiet.  He was not awake; we would pretty well know if he were.  Recently he had taken to moving around without fear.  There was very little sneaking about, stealthily creeping up from behind us to grab and surprise and delight.  That used to be such fun, but then it had gotten to be dreadful, now it was nearly missing.  I shivered at the thought of its presence, and at its loss.

What if we opened one of his gifts?

We couldn't do that, I said.  They're his.

Well, yea-uh!  But what if we did?  We could see what he got and then rewrap it.  We have plenty of time before he wakes up, and we will be so careful he will never notice.  Come on…

No.  Mom will notice.

No, she won't.  Let's go get the tape now to reseal the gift, and scissors to cut it open with.  You'll see, we will do it and no one will ever know.  Quick, go get the tape and scissors!  I hesitated.  "Go get them, now!"

I went because she was bigger than me and knew so much.

No other sounds were being made in the house, no one was creeping around, no one could find me out.  I was stealthily quiet and then there we were, staring at his gifts, each of us silently selecting which present to open.

How it happened was not clear, but we looked up and saw each of our choices reflected in the other's eyes.  Maybe it was because I adored her, maybe because she had shaped me, but our identical choice was the blue-papered gift at the center down-spike of the 'M.'  As my hand made a slight twitching motion, she slowly reached her hand out and touched the gift.  She hesitated as I pulled the hand that hung at the end of my once fractured arm back protectively, fearfully.  Are you scared? she asked.

Somewhat.  But I keep Bear with me.  He tells me everything will be okay as long as he can keep his eye on me.  I have to make sure he is turned with his left side toward me, to watch me closely.

She squinted in puzzlement at my extraneous admission, but left it to wither.

Here goes, she lifted the gift up from the pack.  One of the two next to it shifted a bit to the left.  I wondered if it were on guard and this was its way of alerting the nest of packages to a potential threat, or if it were trying to warn us?  Maybe we needed reining in, to be backed up a few steps, quickly, three at a time before we were too far committed to our future, our terminus.

She looked at me to read how I was interpreting the sidling movement.  The look of uncertainty on my face would not stop her but it indicated the severity of my discomfort.  She knew that ultimately; I would follow her regardless of the depth of my trepidation.  She kept up her pursuit and pointed the scissors at the package.  She slipped them closer, and then carefully slit the tape.  It hissed slightly at the intrusion.  Was that indignation or another warning – an opportunity to step back from the knowledge we were about to gain, knowledge which was to arise from our own doing and which would be considered a transgression by our father?

She looked again at me, and smiled: a bit knowingly.  I thought of the look my doctor adopted when he was testing my reaction to a just completed procedure; the look that followed something discomfiting and that always followed his groping and command to cough, turn my head, and cough again.  It had most recently followed his treatment of a terribly scraped knee I had suffered last Fall.  There had been a lot of bleeding and I had had to remove my pants so he could see and feel around the wound, and clean it and cut away the tattered skin and embedded dirt.  His cutting was hesitant, painful; his cuts ragged edged, likely to leave scars.  Maybe he thought the roughness and crevassed skin of my knee would hide his tendings toward me.

My sister's cut was surgical; thin; delicate; not likely to cause damage, maybe likely only to leave a small reminder for suspicious eyes to discern.  She too did not want anyone to see what she was doing.

But those ministering might not worry so much over an incursion.  It seems that nobody likes to look in that closely at what we do.  The signs, the traces, the indications are all there, but peering in at the arrangements causes warnings to go off inside, calls to action, and us to begin assessing our own situations.  The methodical review of our condition, pursued rigorously, scientifically, provides clear-cut evidence of wrong within.  The scrutiny twists the maxim on its head and the over-examined life becomes unlivable.  Walking failure infects us and begins to run its course.  A deadly, volatile excretion of chemicals in our heads flares up, leaving scars, feelings bleached of meaning, and vacant folds into which flow our new, opportunistic knowledge, our new mix, our disorder.  Rents form and become frayed, ulcerous.  Impermeable membranes dysfunction, becoming porous beyond control.  All of our attention focuses inwards, rushing towards our blinding concentration on nothing.  And then the intake of the external world ceases; and one day – one moment – we are captivated by the searing emptiness and jump in, or cut ourselves free, or aim for the heart, or slink in softly, bathed in diffuse warmth.  At the fatal moment the internal world meets the external again, peremptorily.  We face that from which we have averted our eyes.  Our situation is revealed.  Such revelation kills, so we do not look.

Unaware as yet of this life-preserving fault, I saw the thin slit in the tape, but not yet the tearing motion and the immanent void within the gift.  There she exposed it.  She clinically peeled the paper back and carefully extracted the box inside as though she were a demolitions expert whose life depended upon perfect conduct.

Is this the perfect gift?  Are we despoiling it?  Should we stop and return everything back to what it was, reverse our trajectory?  I looked inside and saw changes taking place.  My thoughts cleared and I was certain we were behaving wrongly.  Continuation was going to be our ruination. There was only a morass stinking about us.  We would fall into its depths and trip headfirst, then end over end as we found nothing to which we could anchor ourselves.  Our up would be down, our inside out as we sometimes plunged feet first; as we sliced through the sticky situation; as we shot for something solid onto which we might settle from this tumbling competition; and as we finally let go of all resistance and got enveloped presently, tightly, and securely.  At this moment I felt that we had only a split second to recover.  No other's gift should be delved into, dissected like this.  The surprise would be taken away, needing to be buried.  But the split second had become whole again.  My sister had cut open the box and released the present.  The joy of opening a gift; how it has been blown away.

Oh… she suspired.  Uh, oh.

I stopped breathing.  My blood froze.  I would have cracked if she had touched me.  I pictured myself as Humpty Dumpty and thought that all the King's horses and men could not put me back together again after this fall.  Oh, no, hissed out with the small seep of air escaping from the crystallized chamber of my rigor mortised body.

Oh, God.  Mom is going to kill us.  She'll know.  He'll know.  We can't pretend we did not do this.  We have to figure out how we can clean it up.  Did you see it coming; did you see how it went up like that?  It was so very pretty.  It was like magic… Magic.  That's it.  The 'M' stands for magic, not man nor monster.  Beneath this cover must be that vanishing trick he has wanted.  Do you remember the one from the magic shop that day?  The owner took that black cloth, covered the crystal ball that was resting on the white box, and then snapped the cloth away and the ball was gone, but it was not inside the box.  The only thing left was a cloud of sparkles that you thought had to be the globe as it was ground into dust.

Oh, woe.  All is darkness, lost.  I had watched the working of the device our mother had prepared.  Inside the gift box she had rigged a small catapult beneath the black coverlet that hid the gift.  She had sprinkled dust over the coverlet and as we lifted the box lid it triggered the catapult and all had burst up into the air, into our arms, into our hair, and everywhere over the tiled floor, leaving trace outlines of we two kneeling like shepherds before the Christmas plunder.  I remember thinking when the sparkles were up floating around our eyes that the stars' light had reentered the house and we were being blessed, but now I see how the stars have descended, fallen to earth because of our willful ignorance of right and wrong behavior.  The light is gone.  Oh, oh…

What happened?  I heard a sonorous voice calling out above me.  The voice changed tone to something more demanding.  Are you okay?  Wake up, wake up!  Keep quiet!  Someone's coming.

I sat up and gasped a little.  My sister reached toward me and tried to brush away the glitter that had stuck to my face as I hit the floor.  Owwww.  That hurts.  A tear seeped from my left eye as a burning pain radiated from my cheekbone that had cracked against the tile floor.  A hellish redness was already limning my thin features.  Inky blue, vile green, and shadowy black would mark the point of impact, and the ground zero of damage.  Another tear flowed and carried away dusty delight.  My sister waved her hand again, but I pulled back from the burning feeling it generated.  No, don't touch me.  It hurts.  Stop it!

Stop it?

No, stop the pain.

Stop crying.

Stop!

Shut up!  Someone's coming.  Stop crying!  And my sister the cover-up artist began to make everything disappear.  I was first to go.  She lifted me up whole.  Dust yourself off here, now.  She waited while I complied.  Go to the bathroom.  Wash your face with very cold water.  Make sure you have all the dust off of you and wipe the floor like Mom does.  Hurry back.

I trotted off.

While I was gone, she took a second step and dusted herself off.

I returned from the bathroom and saw her slit another piece of tape on the wrapping paper and spread the flaps up so as to make it easier to reinsert the gift box.  She continued and re-prepared the package, resetting the spring release beneath the coverlet.

She used a sweeping motion of her hands to collect the fine particles from the floor.

Readied, she returned the dust to its initial resting place.  She rid her hands of the particles with almost the same sweeping motions she had used to collect them.

I knelt down, and she drew my arms to suspend them above the box.  She brushed her hands across my arms, nicking me with her nail.  The few errant flecks of dust released and floated gently onto the black cover, forming what I picked out as protective constellations and halo galaxies in the velveteen.

Step six, she muttered as she closed and sealed the box, storing the evidence for others to find and examine later.

For what were, or would be, her seventh and eighth steps, she slipped the box back inside the paper and was almost through carefully taping up the seams to hide our crime when I heard the penultimate footfall of our brother descending the upper stairway.  In a moment he would make that final step and then half step his way around the corner and square himself at the top of the lower stairs.

My sister gasped.  Blood seeped from a thin, expiatory, paper cut on her palm, and into the flock wrapping.  I looked away and up.  Our brother stepped into view.  He loomed over us.  I burst up from the floor – kicking his gifts asunder and pushing my sister backwards – and tripped head first, end over end.  I tumbled forward unanchored, re-planting my blushing cheek into the fields of carnage.

Stars careened inside my head.  Their presence would protect me; protect us from the little monster.  My sacrifice would save us from the big monster, the man.

Oh, shit.  You dumb bastard.  Get the fuck up.  What the hell are you doing? my brother rumbled.

I floated with the stars.  We were being swept up to coherency.  There were patterns of light.

Why the fuck does he do this?  I told you he is retarded!

Stop it!  Stop saying that, she said defensively.  He is not retarded.

"Then why the fuck does he do things like he just did?  He went spastic.  You saw it.  He jumped up, kicked everything, hit you, and then tripped like he had had both of his shoelaces tied together.  There is something wrong with him."

You would never have said that a year ago.  She cringed, realizing she had succeeded in deflecting his attention away from me, yet too much toward herself.

He looked at her and sharpened his crystal blue-eyed gaze on her cheekiness.  A red blush suffused up into his exposed neck, dawning above her.  His left hand darted forward and grasped her forearm.  She reached across with her other hand to maybe loosen his grip, or wrest what control she could of the situation, but quick as sin he flicked his other hand out and raked a nail across the back of her hand, breaking the skin.  Before blood could even flow, he continued the arcing motion and half-smacked, half-punched, and fully cuffed her cheek.

I burst up from my prone position.  My brother was surprised but not disequilibrated.  He maintained his grip on my sister and sliced his free hand forward, striking my chest with force enough to catapult me up, then over backwards, down again onto the floor, prone.

'I should not be so easily manipulatable,' I thought.  Then I sank through the impassive plane of the floor, into the three-dimensional, flecked void; out of the contested, two-dimensional bruise of reality.

TOC

Chapter Two – Best Friend, 1

I lay face down in the dark earth and heard, I dare you.

The boy who I thought was my best friend hesitated.  His grip on my waist lessened slightly but the weight of his knees on the back of my upper calves did not decrease.

C'mon, Justin, do it.

I squirmed to break free, maybe signal to Justin that he could let go and later plead that he was unable to hold me down, but my absolute inability to escape held me in place beneath the incipient fiction.  Justin was certainly milling the thought about in his mind or he would already have acted.  I bucked to turn him toward my side, but something instinctual, similar to the belligerent response of a cat to the feeble twitching of a fated bird in its claws, stimulated him, and next I knew his fingers clamped into my beltline, cutting through some skin on one side of the small of my back.  He wrenched his hands downwards.  Welts would later appear on my front side where the pants cut in, but the fabric held against his want.  Again, he yanked.  The snap decoupled, but the pants held him in check.  There was still a slight opportunity for him to recover.

I felt weak.  The distance my pants had traveled down was miniscule in fact, but astronomical in the fancy of my mind.  And to cross this small boundary had taken weeks.  At the beginning, and things could have gone in any direction at that time, the initial nudge was an argument I had had with Justin over a call he had made against the opposing team during a late afternoon softball game.  I had said that their player was safe at second base: that from my place at shortstop I could see that David, our second baseman, did not have his foot on the bag at any time before he threw the ball to first base on the double play.

Like the butterfly stirring up ephemeral tempests in the rainforests of Brazil, things could have settled gently down, been only a mild uprising of the stirring friction, but I was not ready to let rest my belief and I held to my contention.  At my second declamation, Justin took a few steps toward me at tight, shortstop position, figuring a little bluster would scare me off.  I said he was out.  The double play stands.  Two outs, next batter!  He turned toward home plate.

I disagreed a third time.  He was safe.  David's foot never touched the bag.  You couldn't see that from where you were, Justin.  A gust of cooler air; an omen of the coming autumn, pressed against me; destabilized me; felt to push me backwards.

Justin spun back toward us; the opposing team's player looked back and forth between us, hung his head slightly and started trotting toward the bench.  David shifted further from the bag, over to second base position, to where he should be, away from me, out of Justin's direct line of sight.  I was isolated, dead center in that sight.  I am the umpire in this game.  He is out.  Stop delaying the game or get off the field, Justin commanded.  Ricky, get ready to pitch.  Batter up!  Now!

I stood my ground.  I looked about for support from others but found no one willing to make eye contact.  I was alone in the field.  Only the strange buffeting winds that intimate the change of seasons and I were pushing boundaries.  The wind, unpredictable yet ever purposeful, pressed me then toward the place Justin had directed me, deep shortstop, and I went.  I had long ago learned that I survived when I allowed myself to play by the rules others laid out for me.

I do not remember who won the game, but I recalled that Justin's voice had begun to disentangle from my mind and begun to weave more deeply through other's minds that day.  I saw patterns of resistance and alliance take form on the playing field.

Today, now, my resistance, my truth, was proven inadequate to the alliance of Justin and Geoffrey over me.  Justin pulled again, with much less force, yet with much more assuredness.  My pants and underpants shuddered down to my knees, exposing fair skin, soon to be darkened in the burning daylight.

Oww…ww, I half wailed.  Geoffrey's weight on my ribcage precluded any serious, resounding cry.  I gasped for air.  My genitalia scraped against rock, dirt and vines.

Teach him a lesson, Geoffrey directed.  He's a faggot.  You don't want everyone to think you're one too.  They will if you don't do something to show them you aren't.

Justin fought off his doom and followed Geoffrey's plotted course.  He reached for a broken, soft, rotting branch, raised it above me, and then swung it slowly down.  I felt the scraping of its end as he pressed it against my anus.  This was wrong.  Justin twisted the branch a little.

Geoffrey exhorted him, Show him you're the man and that he'd better never ever argue with you again.

Justin twisted the branch a little more.  It did not quite hurt, he pressed with so little force.  It was so confusing what he was doing to me.  I had not done anything to deserve this.  I was his friend; his best friend and had been for years.  What was wrong?  What had I done wrong?

Justin pressed a little bit more.  With a catch in his throat he said, You fag…got.  Don't ever do that to me again.  Don't make me look like the bad guy.  He threw the branch to the side.  He raised himself up and faced away from Geoffrey, adjusting his pants which had been displaced during the assault.  I saw the bluffing.  The wrong here was that Justin was enjoying this in a different way, that he had wanted something like this.  What he did not want was for it to hurt, but to be heatedly resolute and for me to be the one against whom he pressed without device.  My best friend was gay, and I was and had been in love with him – but Geoffrey and his caustic, self-centered kind existed and voiced hatred, doubt, and shame into the thoughts of those they tempestuously twisted around them; those who rejected their ordained fate.

I hated Justin just then.

Geoffrey laughed.  He dropped his elbow into the back of my head, crushing my cheek into a rock, knocking stars and blackness into my vision.  Little faggot.  Better not tell, or we'll let everyone know you asked for it.  And there's more where that came from.  Right, Justin?  He stood up.  I gulped in air, otherwise I did not move.

There was near human silence.  I was not dead though.  I was alive.

I lay in recovery.  Justin and Geoffrey walked away.  Their voices fragmented.  Geoffrey's growlings and pronouncements punctuated their progress.  Occasionally Justin's tones resounded through the woods.

I loved him just then.  I forgave him.  I could understand everything he had done.  I occasionally would ache and my wrong-headedness would drive me to want to hurt myself, sometimes to kill.  For now, I lay unpunishable as my breathing regularized.  I did not want to hurt.  I watched the whirling stars, my childhood retreat, fade away.  As the last ones decreased in magnitude, I removed myself from my mind's vision and rolled onto my side, then onto my back.  I sat up, momentarily stunned by renewed flashings, but they too passed.  I looked down to my midsection and saw the blood and dirt and leaves pressed into my stomach and mixed amongst my pubic hairs.  Dull and cutting pains pulsed from my groin.  I had some difficulty catching a full breath.  It felt as though Geoffrey still had his knee jacked against my rib cage.  I reached my hand down and made brushing motions to rid myself of the core evidence.

I recognized that the sights I was seeing would never really go away.  I began to cry.  Justin had pushed me, had gone to the edge, but not jumped, or loosed the bindings holding