ADAM SLEPER

My heart skips a beat. I’ve caught myself daydreaming for a few seconds. I scan the park for Mitch. A woman by the pond hands a kid bread to feed ducks, a man in a suit reclines in his car seat snatching a few winks during lunch, men and women jog by holding their dogs safely on leashes.
        Most people got lunch breaks, government mandated time to eat, to set aside job stress, relax. Not me.
        The sun pings off a glass bottle peeking out of a trashcan, temporarily blinding me. A white flash precedes everything I see for a few seconds, like a warning. Mitch drinks awkwardly from the water fountain, lips pressed too close to the metal, reacting skittishly to the water pressure. The normal kids bounce and twirl in the sand-swirled play area.
        Satisfied nothing sinister is afoot for at least thirty seconds, I bite into my bologna and mustard sandwich. Today is Tuesday. Tuesday afternoons I take Mitch to “school.”
        Just that morning, I’d had a serious chat with Mrs. Volscheweitz, whom the kids call Mrs. V. Broad shouldered and formidable, Mrs. V wears large floral print dresses that could double as curtains, and bright yellow shoes resembling kids’ drawings. She smells like a mixture of the stores selling concert posters and girly perfume, perhaps to counter her muscular arms and full figure. She’s Mitch’s primary teacher the last few years, and his greatest advocate.
        “Look, can I be direct?” She’d said. “Any more fits, I won’t be able to keep him in this school any more. There’s the safety and welfare of other children to consider. I’d hate to see him slip through the cracks, but my lobbying is only gonna be reckoned with for so much longer.”
        Mitch’s most recent incident happened last week at the public library. I’d turned my head for maybe five seconds. An explosion of glass. Mitch had snatched a chair and hurled it into the TV atop the rolling cart. I struggled to restrain him—it always felt like slow motion—debating  the allotted legal maneuvers in my mind. Hand placement over or under his arm. Can I pin his arms behind his back? Was this one of the six suitable steps for takedowns? Will this move avoid his teeth or a headbutt to the face? All group home employees lip-synced a self-defense class during onboarding, multiple evenings of leverage, leg whips, and avoiding liability.
        After all, these were kids we would be restraining.
        I followed protocol through the screams, spit, and sirens. Eventually a cop showed up, only to underestimate tiny Mitch, as they always do. Mitch sensed an opening as the cop freed a hand to corral his walkie-talkie. Johnny “I got it from here” Law doubled over after a kick to the crotch. Taken out of context, tossed in with silly sound effects and animated, the incident might’ve been from a Looney Tunes cartoon. Instead, he’s a ward of the state lashing out in the presence of one of the three people in the universe who gave a shit about him.
        Mitch was the age most normal kids still watched such cartoons. Eleven. Only eleven years old. And I would bet money against him making it five more years, to see either his 16th birthday or the 21st century.
        I’d told her how the cop then slammed Mitch into the wall, knocking the wind out of the kid. How the cop kept yelling “goddam freak” over and over, which, though true, was a rotten and rude thing to say to a kid. I’d reported it to his precinct.
        “What did you think of the hospital?” She’d asked, plucking lint from her dress.
        “Like something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
        “Remember Evan, you guys give him structure, and that home is the last line of defense between him and a permanent stay at that hospital. His stay of execution until he’s eighteen. You try to brighten his life a little here and there. It’s all we can do. Remember that. Mitch is one sick little boy, the sickest I’ve ever met.”
        I’d nodded. Mitch had changed from Boy to Broken well before I’d met him. Maybe it’d happened overnight or maybe slowly over the years—the ground water of hate, violence, hurt, and nothingness slowly seeping down onto him, forming horns on his head (were those stalagmites or stalactites that rose from the cave floor in drip-water deposits, seeking the ceiling?).
        At that point I guess I still believed it. That he could be saved. After all, why else take the job? Stupid and naïve me wanted to make a difference. It certainly paid shit. And nobody knew true embarrassment until they’d tackled a child in front of horrified, judgmental adults at a public library, a WalMart, or a Burger King.
        I return to squinting through the high afternoon sun at kids climbing jungle gyms and swapping teeter-totter partners. My eyes rarely stray from Mitch’s blazing red jacket he insists on wearing even in the summer. But at this moment I don’t see him.
        Suddenly, screams. I’m upright and darting toward the sound’s source, the slide.
        A high school assistant from Mrs. V’s school consoles a girl as I arrive.
       “What happened?” I say, as if I can’t guess. Mitch grins maniacally from atop the slide.
        A constellation of scarlet smears the girl’s arm, some wadded-up skin. Satisfied he’s confined for the moment, I brush the girl’s hair with my hand. No longer sobbing, but still drawing choppy breaths and exhaling whimpers, she dares a frightened glance at Mitch. Tossing my keys to the high schooler, I shout for her to retrieve the first aid kit from my car.
        “Time to go home now, Mitch. You’ve lost your privileges for the day.”
        “No, don’t wanna go.” The remorse in his voice brought on by the prospect of returning home rather than by any genuine regret. “You can’t make me.”
        “If I have to come up there, no school this afternoon.”
         Jesus, that empty, sovereign grin. His eleven-year-old spindly frame makes him pass for about eight. He barely casts a shadow on the freshly mown grass. His features have an elf-like quality, little ears slanting upwards, able to detect the slightest tremor of unsurety in an authority figure’s voice. His top teeth protrude so that on rare occasions when he speaks it seems his nose is playing piano. His toes resemble claws clutching at his plastic sandals. 
        Tiny and freckled, he looks like he belongs in the hollow of a tree baking cookies.
        “One, two, three…”
         He descends. Kicks a pile of sand into my face upon my approach.
         My left eye stings. I clamp a hand around his arm, a Cyclops clutching a cyclone. Mitch flails, with surprising slippery strength. Finally I’ve got him. I unfold him on a picnic table.
        “Mitch, look. This has gotta stop. You’re one step away from getting your butt kicked outta school. You don’t want that, right?”
        As I let him go, he stares at me, half-mannequin, half-gargoyle. He’s still. Reminds me of a statue in Germany of a Grimm’s fairy tale urchin I once saw in a textbook.
        “You like Mrs. V, right?”
        “Yes.” His lisp tricks people into thinking he learned to talk yesterday.
        “Why’d you do that?”
        “Coz Inez was mean to Betty.” Betty was his vexing invisible friend.
        “I don’t care…forget it. Look, you like Mrs. V and she likes you. Even though you give
her nothing but grief. You know these little stunts hurt your chances to stay in this school,
right?”
        Remorseless. No use ordering syllables from him. I pretend I’m rehearsing a script for an imagined conversation I might have with a normal kid over revoking dessert. It keeps me sane.
        “Mitch, this is important. I need to know you understand you did a bad thing to Inez?”
        He nods. This time his willingness to play “power struggle” is outlasted by mine.
        “C’mon. If you take your meds, I’ll see what I can do about school next week.”
        It’s difficult enough to enforce meds without establishing a link to punishment.
        Therefore, I sweeten the deal, handing him the rest of my soda to wash down the pills.
        Immediately Mitch’s eyelids flutter. He fakes sleeping, cartoonish snores.
        I shouldn’t let him win, I know. Shouldn’t let him manipulate me into carrying him.
        Unlike an argument with a boyfriend or girlfriend, you had to win all the small battles with Mitch.
        But Mitch wins and I end up carrying him. Slumber, even amateur-styled fake slumber, proves to double his weight. The kid like a corpse in my arms.
        Carting mini Charles Starkweather over the humble Frontier Park baseball diamond, my footprints trace the chalk remnants of the first base line like a superstitious baseball player. I’d gone to the University on a baseball scholarship but broke both bones in my left leg clean in half while playing football with some friends. I’d healed, but losing the scholarship still stung, nearly two years later.
        Now I was stuck in Lincoln, Nebraska. The city itself a Halfway Home for the descendants of pioneers who gave up halfway to dreams of gold. Lured by the siren call of bland accents, grasshoppers, and plenty of parking.
        “I’m not giving up on you,” I said, trying to channel Mrs. V.
        To which one of us would she say this, I wondered?


No one ever fell in love in this house, I thought the first time I saw the house that held one lone permanent resident, Mitch. The meager but corruptible budget for state group homes apparently didn’t allot expenditures for general house maintenance. Or air conditioning, or windows that opened without a crowbar. Weeds ate through cracks in the walkway leading to the front door, jutting through self-issued fissures. On the side of the house Mitch and me would eventually dig out a makeshift garden so he could enjoy creating little floods when he watered each row, squealing in delight when an errant ant was swept downstream in its torrent. A house equally demonic and despotic, both states ruled by Mitch. Husked down to clinging chips of maroon paint. Past its brown yard a simple concrete step leads to the front door, which always struck me as anti-climactic. Such a structure required at minimum a wooden drawbridge over a moat, especially given Mitch’s propensity to attempt escape. Once inside, a simple sliding lock perched atop the right-hand corner of the front door, low enough for my co-workers and me to reach, and for Mitch only a chair assist away.
        The living room couch once served as a giant scratching post for saber-toothed tigers. A large TV crouched tenuously upon a thrift store stand. Mitch never watches it. What kind of kid tosses chairs through TV’s instead of watching them? Only once can I recall Mitch watching something, a biography of B.B. King. He’d sat mesmerized, for once his far-away stare seemingly attuned to the present. Something funny about a pale, freckled, eleven-year-old tapping the twelve-bar beat with his fingers on the exposed wooden end of a couch.
        I guess if anyone understood the blues, Mitch did. So I made him a blues mix CD, which I played often, especially when driving him in my car. Sometimes it subdued him. Often it did not.
        “Stop fooling with the lock. Keep the damn door closed, please.”
        Mitch yanks the door handle with one hand, continually locking and unlocking the door with his other. The ruse being every time he jerks the handle to pretend he’s jumping out, the door is locked, thereby completing the successful taunt. My shitbox is bereft of automatic locks.
        In fact, my beater of a car is conspicuously not-demonic-child-proof. There’s no air conditioning, and I can’t allow window privileges for Mitch, thanks to his fascination with throwing objects out of the vehicle. My eyes twitch and my hands stick to the wheel as I drive, drenched in sweat. I’m running a slight fever from sunburn.
        I try to summon something to talk about. I’ve got a girl and she’s on my mind, but I don’t want her to be tainted by this other world, this haunted house I disappear to for forty hours a week. So I don’t mention Mitch to her and sure as hell don’t mention her to Mitch. If the two worlds ever collided, what if the rift in the time-space continuum resulted in allowing Cthulhu to come calling?
        “Hey Mitch.” Rolling up my t-shirt sleeve, I expose my ruby appendage. “Check it out. Went fishing this weekend, fell asleep by the side of the lake. Stupid, huh? I’m a lobster.”
        Suddenly fingernails scrape my sunburned back, through my shirt.
        “Jesus Christ.” I swat his hand away. Slam on the brakes. “What the hell?”
        It hurts, the temple of my forehead throbs. Mitch laughs like an understudy for another unnecessary The Omen sequel.
         Thankfully we’re close to home. His jack-o’-lantern jeer greets my rearview mirror.
        “Fine. You get to listen to the shitty pop music station the rest of the way.” But Ace of
Base punishes me more than it punishes him. I saw the sign, indeed. Signs of demonic
possession, if I’d believed in such a thing.
        It occurs to me how rarely he speaks. If someone ever recorded my audio “conversations” with Mitch, they would replay like a mad catalogue of soliloquies from Macbeth.


“How was he at school today?” Bill says, peering up from his time sheet.
        “Jesus, you scared me.”
        “Sorry.”
         It’s dark outside, and we’re in the “office,” a small antechamber of the kitchen separated by a multi-locked door. It’s as impossible for Mitch to break into the “office” as it’s possible for him to escape through the front or back doors. The kid could run away on a dime, but was no threat to interrupt a counselor’s game of computer solitaire. Inside, a Pentagon’s pile of files documented Mitch’s horrific upbringing. His life’s story read like something Faulkner conjured during a fever dream then abandoned on the cutting room floor. Raped by both father and grandfather. Mom leashed him to the porch as punishment or when she wanted to skip town to scrounge for drugs.
        “Well, he refused to walk again today after the meds.”
        “Did he eat lunch?” Bill removes his Cubs hat to scratch his curly brown hair. As a
supervisor, Bill popped in unannounced frequently. Much to his wife’s chagrin he was always on call, and once signaled for an emergency he would show up right away, Batman with mutton chops sideburns in a rusty Volkswagen.
        “No. But he ate a peanut butter and banana sandwich before bed. About those meds…I’m not…exactly licensed to dispense those or anything—"
        “None of us are.” Bill blows on his glasses, rubbing the lenses against his flannel shirt.
       “State’s got no idea the shit goes down here. We’re the outsiders of the outsiders. They only bother to check up on us once in a while to do a body count.”
        Overhead on the monitor I see Mitch sound asleep, blanket curled by his nose. Doped up pretty good. MonsterVision presents: A sandman phantasm.
        “Don’t know how you do it,” I say. Bill was mostly over at the other house. “I couldn’t handle six teenage sex offenders under one roof. It’s like The Brady Bunch from hell over there.”
        “Well, those guys can’t imagine trading places with you. Over there we’ve at least got a
couple coworkers on duty with us. It’s true keeping Roger from molesting small children ain’t easy, he’s huge now, not a wee little Mitch hobbit. Turned my back for a sec the other day at the rec center and he already had his hand on some boy’s leg, chatting him up in that creepy voice of his. Guess what I got to do the other day?”
        I shrug, anticipating something atrocious or funny, usually both.
        “Jimmy turned eighteen last week. I drew the short straw to deep clean his room. Turns out Jimmy whitewashed his walls with cum.”
        “What?”
        “Yep, caked all over. Had to use a sponge and scrub like a madman. Found an old pair of his mother’s heels stowed in his closet. His fapping fuel, no doubt.”
        “That’s sad. And gross.”
        Bill grabs lemonade from the fridge. “Want a glass?”
        I shake my head. “I’m grateful you didn’t offer milk just now.”
        “So, I took your advice, bought Mitch an Aretha Franklin CD for his birthday. He loves it.” Bill downs the lemonade, pausing to belch. “The wife says she wants to have a baby. Can’t say this job inspires one for that.”
        “Don’t suppose.”
        “Did I tell you I met her once?” Bill says. “Mitch’s mom?”
        “Thought she lived in California? According to the files.”
        “Who knows? Those files are ancient scrolls. Guess she just decided to ride her broom
east one day. Showed up all strung out.”
        “You talked to her?”
       “Told her to get the hell off the property before I called the cops. She gave me that same creepy smile she bequeathed to her brood. I threw my pack of condoms at her and asked her on behalf of the world to never breed again.”
        “You did what?”
        “I made that last part up. But I should’ve. Let’s step outside for a smoky treat.”
        Outside, Bill lit his cigarette with a worn, silver lighter. The sun had set recently, but it
was a fast dark these days. We watch the monitor through the window.
        “Poor little guy,” I say. “Gotta confess, kinda nervous. My first overnight solo.”
        “Well, Mitch’s one saving grace is he usually sleeps through the night. I left you a sixer.”
        “You rule.”
        “I should go soon,” Bill says. “I’m here so often I think the old lady suspects I’ve got a
mistress. Mitch ain’t my idea of a side piece. I’d imagine my mistress a little older, female, and, you know, less creepy, with normal teeth and stuff. Ever run across the file on Mitch’s sayonara from the public school system?”
         I shake my head.
        “Mitch was in third grade, so this is like eighteen months ago. As you know, Mitch ain’t exactly a maestro of his bowel movements. Well, one day he shits himself en route to the school bathroom. Too embarrassed to tell anyone, he returns to class as if nothing’s happened. Without wiping himself, mind you. Teacher smells it. Blasts him in front of the class. Orders some boy to escort him to the bathroom. Only there, the kid pokes fun at Mitch. So Mitch slams the kid’s head against the solid wall. Mitch smears a bunch of his shit into the kid’s face and hair. Eventually someone else wanders in, only to discover blood and shit and Mitch with his dick out pissing on his classmate. Gave the kid a concussion, it turned out.”
        Bill stops to draw his breath. Lights another cigarette.
        “Man,” is all I’m able to say.
        “And that’s how it came to be that once upon a time a kid not even ten years old lived in a crummy old shoe built just for him. A group home without a group. An abode for going insane, and tormenting a chosen few along the way. Using your tax dollars, of course.”
        “Our budding Norman Bates,” I say. “Did that school thing happen around the time his foster mom died?”
        “Yep, she’d died a few months before. Poor kid. By all accounts she was actually kind to him. Mitch was damaged goods by then, sure, but that was the last straw.”
        We shake our heads at the monitor. In his sleep, Mitch looks frail and innocent. I imagine he’s having good dreams. Otherwise, I can’t believe in a heaven.
        “I want to help him,” I say, “but the more I’m around him the more I feel it’s impossible.
We’re trying to piece together a broken light bulb.” 
        “We keep him off the streets. It’s all we do. All we can do. A couple of these kids, tops, have a fighting chance of contributing to society once the state funds stop. Most, like Mitch, don’t. They’ll end up being shipped to an institution the moment they blow out the last candle on their 18th birthday cake. Assuming he lives that long. My advice? When you’re off the clock, don’t think about the little fucker. Find yourself a pretty freshman with long legs and a sweet disposition. Don’t even talk to your mother about him.”


That night I’m in the middle of a dream when I’m suddenly aware my eyes are open. I’m
observing what I think’s a half moon only it begins to shift shape, morphing into the lower region of a boy’s face, teeth carved as an amateur pumpkin.
        “What the….” I lick my lips, which are coated in middle-of-night film. “Mitch?”
        Slowly his entire face saunters into the light, his ethereal pace, at first, seems contrived. His wild eyes sear through my skin. His face a caricature of a small boy’s, puffy and fake, concocted by a mad taxidermist. Wearing aqua blue and yellow pajamas, his cowlick swaying in the fan’s breeze. Even in his apparent sleepwalking state, I’m paralyzed. Something in his hand catches the moonlight, stealing the gleam from his teeth. I leap from the couch, clasping his arm. Still, he sleeps. Gently, with calmer nerves, I loosen his grip on the frame of the picture of his foster mom. Lead the little zombie back to bed.


I pretend Mitch is improving. Five minutes of playing “grocery store” without incident. (Mitch sticks price tags on all the food with masking tape and I purchase the goods with Monopoly money). Mitch makes ice by running water over an ice cube tray, then sticking it in the freezer. But for every brief respite from Demon Damien there are litigation-free maneuvers in public places before the priggish disapproval of strangers, during which I fear bumping into the cute girl from Geometry. I divide the minutes of my shift into manageable fractions. I piss with one eye on the open bathroom door.
        At the group homes, we try to catch the kids in a brief window between victim and
victimizer. To sever the cycle of abuse. For some, no such window exists. I keep trying to
rehabilitate Mitch and he continues to resist. Instead of padding my resume or pounding
baseballs, I spend the summer collecting scars.
        Three weeks into summer, Mitch has hired Betty to be his invisible secretary.
        “Why don’t you tell me when my mom calls,” he accuses me. “None of you ever tell me. Bill hangs up and tells me it’s his wife. He lies. You all lie.”
        Mitch’s ears jut out even farther when he’s angry, like one of those jackasses in Pinocchio.
Betty answers the phone, reveals to Mitch the messages we hid from him. At odd hours of the night, she “checks” the machine, just to be sure. She convinces Mitch we are poisoning him.
        Betty is a bit of a bitch.
        Crushing Mitch’s meds into his applesauce works less often. Eventually, Mitch embarks on what can only be described as an undeclared hunger strike. Mitch was not like Mahatma Gandhi in countless ways, to be sure—one was a proponent of civil disobedience, the other a proponent of uncivil disobedience plus known to piss on the cars of guests. But they both shared an unflappable ability to suppress their appetites in the face of oppression. 
        For a few days, he ate nothing any of us set in front of him. Here and there I would catch him sneaking a Popsicle from the freezer, but I would say nothing. The bread supply slowly dwindled. I began finding wrappers from processed cheese slices strewn about in the trash under the sink. Still, even thieving Fritos, he wasn’t eating enough.
        Betty continues to play office gossip. She informs Mitch his mom has come to take him home to California while he was out buying candy, but Bill had covered it up. Mitch loves conspiracy theories.


Mitch’s car is coming along.
        I rinse out a plastic milk jug and fill it with sugar-free cherry Kool-Aid for the gas tank. Occasionally, I peek into his room and Mitch will be siphoning it, simulating the amount of fuel burned after a road trip. Someone brought a couple self-feeding dog dishes to serve as antifreeze and oil containers. The car’s body is a series of large cardboard boxes held together by tape and glue. Magic marker racing stripes line the exterior, Mitch’s handiwork, straight and proportionate. An old Atari joystick serves as a gear shaft, the gas and brake pedals repurposed from an old sewing machine. Paper-mache gauges line the interior. The speedometer an odometer from Bill’s old bike. Mitch sits atop a chair, his hands upon a steering wheel I found at the dump. Below his toes lay an authentic floor mat, abandoned at a car wash. Two mediumsized, sixty-watt light bulbs super glued to the front of the car for headlights. Mitch enjoys theatricalizing the revving motor.
        “Where you heading Mitch?” I ask him.
        “California, to see my mom.”
        Boundaries are important with Mitch, laughable, but important. Parameters haggled over, limits set—one can of root beer a day, ten bucks allowance Fridays, bedtime an hour later on Saturdays. Often I set a limit for naught, as the next day’s counselor would either forget or ignore the rule. A simple note would’ve sufficed in many cases, but we didn’t communicate with each other any better than we communicated with Mitch. We were college kids. To wit, just this morning I found a pizza I’d forgotten I’d ordered a week ago, under my bed.
        Social mores were but evanescent walls through which Mitch’s ghostly conscience
passed. One physical boundary he rarely crossed, for whatever reason, remained the entrance to our office, even though we sometimes forgot to lock it. An unknown force repelled Mitch from its premises, like the shower curtain seemed to repel him from bathing. Perhaps he stayed away because it contained his past, his fits and giggles encoded into blips and riddles.
        Until today.
        Betty warns Mitch the applesauce is laced. I’ve got a hangover and a big test tomorrow…I’ll concede this battle at this time.
        But in my absentmindedness I leave the office door ajar. Commotion seizes my attention, before the pain. A pencil protrudes from my arm. I rip it out and chase after him. A chair crashes near the living room’s vicinity. I race to the front of the house, knocking the phone off the wall in my rush. My eyes pounce upon the slightly opened door under the undone lock.
        Okay, we’re in our Tom and Jerry mode again.
        Outside I yell his name. Search front yards and back yards. Even knock on the weird
neighbor’s door.
        “That creepy kid loose again?”
        I nod. His white shirt stained with what might be an exploded hot dog.
        “Christ. You guys need to get a leash.” The long vowel effectively blows a whiskeydipped waft in my direction. “Last time I seen him was pissing on the side of my house like a goddam skunk.”
        The man mumbles something as I pass the side of his house, wading through his lawn’s vehicle graveyard. A dog barks. Picking up my pace, my arm and lungs throb like the out-ofshape asshole I’ve become. I reach the other end of the vacant lot behind a red house. A chainlink fence lined with bushes. That’s when I hear it. Rustling in the bushes. Something moves.
        “Mitch? That you?”
        I peer through the fence. A soft, high-pitched hiss emanates from the dark bushes. I cup a hand over my ear to lean against the fence, like they do in the cartoons. The gesture provokes its intended response: giggles.
        An article of clothing flares through a pattern of undergrowth. Mitch grows quiet. Facing the opposite direction, he thinks because he can’t see me that I can’t see him, as if he’s a cat.
        “Why’d you do that to my arm, buddy?” Realizing he’s exposed, he turns to face me.
        “You’re not in any trouble. Just come out.”
         I know by the time I’m able to scale the fence he’ll be long gone. Mitch chuckles. I
chuckle back. Mitch holds his arm in mock pain, meant surely to insult me. But while he knew everything about pain, and could parody its look, he knew nothing about the pain of others. That was something he could not truly fathom.
        “C’mon, Mitch. Why run away? I read your favorite books, cook your favorite meals,
make music mixes for you, help you build your car and tend your garden, buy you candy…”
        Silence.
        “What about Betty, you just gonna abandon her, leave her here all alone?”
        “She’s safe.” That lisp, so endearing. He’s Broken, yes, but still a Kid. And I’m in charge of protecting him.
        “What about the garden? Don’t you wanna see those tomatoes grow nice and plump?
Don’t you wanna carve the pumpkins from the seeds you planted? I’m not taking care of the garden if you leave, Mitch. I’ll just let it rot. So help me, I will.”
        Is he placated for the moment? Ramble on, says the song.
        “You know, not many boys live in their own house. Imagine that, 11 years old and you
call the shots! Set the temperature how you like, nice and warm, watch what you want, listen to what you want, eat what you want. You’re a lucky boy Mitch.”
        He giggles. Okay, maybe he’s got a point there.
        “May I ask where you plan on going?” Why am I speaking formally?
        “To see my mom.”
        “She’s in California.”
        “No, she’s not.”
        “You’ve got no money, no extra clothes. Think how cold you get. You’ve got no jacket.”
        “You go get it.” Though he’s still facing the other way, I imagine his pre-conversion-Grinch smile curling his lip. “I’ll wait here.”
        “Clever. How about we get it together?”
        Silence.
        “I’ll make your peanut butter and banana sandwich, my skinny Elvis. C’mon, let’s get
you something to eat.”
        “Bye.”
        “Mitch!” I raise my voice for the first time. Mitch emerges from the underbrush on his haunches, poised to run.
        “Who’s gonna care for you out there?” Spreading my hands now. “Fine, run away. See if I care. I don’t even make seven bucks an hour, for Christ’s sake! Better off flipping burgers—at least then I’d get a cheeseburger with a coke for lunch instead of applesauce with a friggin’ juice box. I don’t need this. It’s Friday night for fuck’s sake, I should be sauced at some party... swapping numbers or…tongues…with some girl. Run then. Go. See if I care.”
        He shows his face. His eyes rattle to and fro like the last two Tic Tacs in a container.
        He runs.
        “Little shit.”
        Scaling the fence, hopping over, fearing it’s too late. I canvas the neighborhood. Other
neighborhoods. Pause in the middle of a street. Empty save for a few cars. No dogs bark. No stars shine. A few more houses. Nothing. No screams yet from someone discovering a deranged elf hiding out in their garage.
        The drugstore cashier says, “Haven’t seen him pal,” before I even ask. Pride stops me
from calling Bill. What good would it do? Then again what good did any of this do? How could anyone rehabilitate a human husk of atrocities stitched together in the guise of a small boy?
        Friday. 8:30 PM. Calendars conspire and timepieces trick one into accepting a certain
reality. After a while, the abnormal becomes normal because it’s really just the familiar.
Mitch will end up in a fortress with no exit. Either way, his story ends in a box, of one
kind or another.
        I scour gridded streets for a three-mile radius, a right angle here, a 180-degree turn there. Civilization, pavement, signs, geometry.
        After another thirty minutes or two hours, I’m back at Amityville. The motion detector lights turn on. The chipped red paint of the house resembles dried bloodstains. Inside, I wash my arm, squeeze ointment on my wound, and grab a Canada Dry from the fridge. In the halter of silence, Mitch’s crayon canvases on the fridge wait. Oversized dopey cars and grimacing suns.
        I wait also.
        Why don’t I flee? I don’t owe anyone shit. In my apartment there’s leftover Chinese
food. But like Mitch’s paintings on the fridge, I’m held by a magnetic force: pathos, duty, fear, something unnamable? Held like a hostage in this wasted intention of a home.
        The cop on the phone knows me, knows Mitch, knows the drill.
        Outside, moths coagulate. I fumble in my pocket for the pack of smokes Bill left, breaking one accidentally. I get one lit. An ash flutters towards the motion detector light, as if struggling to reach its brightness. Downtown lights a faint halo above the trees. Clouds muffle the stars with their rags of ether. I can’t remember a comparable noiseless, moonless night.
        I make a promise to myself, something I can control: When I have kids I will become a besotted dad, doting on them mercilessly. I’ll give them not only everything they ask for, but also anything my imagination can conjure they might ever want. Most of all, I’ll love them fiercely. My love will cling to them, pass into their blood and encode into their DNA, the way the sun diffuses the dawn before lending its essence to the moon.
        Another puff, the cigarette erodes toward the filter. A line of stubborn ash clings before plummeting all at once to the lawn. I’m reminded how fascinated I was as a kid—about Mitch’s age—with the Mount St. Helen’s volcanic eruption. Captivated by photos of the Washington countryside just after. A moonscape as far as your vision could stretch. The green landscape  gobbled away, a dominion of sterile gray ash. It wouldn’t be a hospitable place to grow living things for a long time.
        And so I wait. Wait for a reprieve from silence and thought. For one of the inevitable sounds: a siren, a scream, a phone to ring.