First, Body: Stories

He touched his mother too often and in the wrong way. He leaned too close, tapping her arm to be sure she was listening. He tore chicken from the bone with his teeth, left his face greasy. Everything meant something it hadn’t meant before.

She couldn’t stand it, his big hands on her. He realized now how rarely she’d touched him. He remembered her cool palm on his forehead, pushing the hair off his face. Did he have a temperature? He couldn’t remember. He felt an old slap across his mouth for a word he’d spit out once and forgotten. He remembered his mother licking her thumb and rubbing his cheek, wiping a dark smudge.

He thought of the body he couldn’t touch, then or now — her velvety, loose skin over loose flesh, soft crepe folding into loose wrinkles.

His father was the one to tell him. They were outside after di

Sid wanted to say no one should come between a husband and a wife, not even a child, but he only nodded, like a man, and his father patted his back, like a man. He said, “I guess I should turn on the sprinkler.” And Sid said, “I’ll do it, Dad.”

They must have talked after that, many times. But in Sid’s mind this was always the last time. He remembered forever crawling under the prickly juniper bushes to turn on the spigot as the last thing he did for his father. Remembered forever how they stood, silent in the dark, listening to water hitting leaves and grass.

He was in the living room now with his mother, after all these years, drinking instant coffee made from a little packet — it was all she had. It was still so hot. She said it. It’s still so hot. It was almost dark, but they hadn’t turned on the lights because of the heat, so it was easy for Sid to imagine the shadow of his father’s shape in the chair, easy to believe that now might have been the time his father said at last, Tell me, son, how it was, the truth, tell me. It was like this. Think of the meanest boy you knew in sixth grade, the one who caught cats to cut off their tails. It’s like that. But not all the time. Keep remembering your eleven-year-old self, your unbearable boy energy, how you sat in the classroom hour after hour, day after day, looking out the window at light, at rain. Remember the quivering leaves, how you felt them moving in your own body when you were a boy — it’s like that, the waiting, the terrible boredom, the longing for something to happen, anything, so you hate the boy with the cat but you’re thrilled too, and then you hate yourself, and then you hate the cat for its ridiculous howling and you’re glad when it runs into the street crazy with pain — you’re glad when the car hits it, smashes it flat. Then the bell rings, recess is over, and you’re in the room again — you’re taking your pencils out of your little wooden desk. The girl in front of you has long, shiny braids you know you’ll never touch, not now, not after what you’ve seen, and then you imagine the braids in your hands, limp as cats’ tails, and Mrs. Richards is saying the words stifle, release, mourn, and you’re supposed to spell them, print them on the blank page, pass the paper forward, and later you’re supposed to think the red marks — her sharp corrections, her grade — matter.

He could be more specific. If his father wanted to know. At night, you dig a hole in red clay and sleep in the ground. Then there’s rain. Sheets and rivers and days of rain. The country turns to mud and smells of shit. A tiny cut on your toe festers and swells, opens wider and wider, oozes and stinks, an ulcer, a hole. You think about your foot all the time, more than you think about your mother, your father, minute after minute, the pain there, you care about your foot more than your life — you could lose it, your right big toe, leave it here, in this mud, your foot, your leg, and you wonder, how many pieces of yourself can you leave behind and still be called yourself? Mother, father, sister — heart, hand, leg. One mosquito’s trapped under your net. You’ve used repellent — you’re sticky with it, poisoned by it — but she finds the places you’ve missed: behind your ear, between your fingers. There’s a sweet place up your sleeve, under your arm. And you think, This is the wound that will kill me. She’s threading a parasite into your veins. These are the enemies: mud, rain, rot, mosquito. She’s graceful. She’s not malicious. She has no brain, no intentions. She wants to live, that’s all. If she finds you, she’ll have you. She buzzes at your head, but when she slips inside there’s no sound.

It’s still so hot. He wants to bang the keys of the out-of-tune piano. He wants a racket here, in his mother’s house. He longs for all the dark noise of Roxa

So he is saying it, her name. He is telling his mother, I’ve been seeing someone, and his mother is saying, That’s nice, Sid — you should bring her to di