Martyr's Mirror

(previously unpublished and/or rejected by many journals)

In the book of my youth, the chapter most people would probably want to skip ahead to read-assuming these people could-would be the one about those two months in the middle of my twelfth year, when I broke into over a dozen homes and stole, in total, thirty-eight clocks of various types, from hanging wall to portable alarm, before my streak was ended by a disturbed man with the evil intent of drowning his daughter's toy pony.

    But first I want to tell you about my sister, Lisa.

    Lisa was a first rate ball player, seven years my senior. She had snap-quick twitchers and a can't-miss set shot. She started point for the West Noble Chargers her freshman season and took them to the sectional finals her sophomore and junior years. Unfortunately, basketball was not Lisa's true love. Lisa's true love was the Charger's center, Tamra Dusseldorf, a tall blocky girl rumored to stuff her shorts with a corn-cob before games. I say ‘unfortunately' not because I'm against the muff-on-muff, myself. I didn't even realize Lisa was a fish-eater till years later. And I didn't hold it against her once I did. I loathe the person, not the lifestyle. But our parents couldn't quite handle it. When Tamra butchily asked my father for his consent to take Lisa to prom, Mom and Dad went straight to the girls' coach. When the coach, a non-practicing lesbian herself, suggested they try celebrating their daughter's preferences rather than judging them, they decided to move to another town.

    Seven weeks later, we left Cromwell for Maple City, a mid-sized town thirty minutes north of Noble County. Our parents chose Maple City for its private school system, Bethel Christian. BC was a Mennonite-run institution, setup campus style with separate cement block buildings for the grade, middle and high school levels. Our parents enrolled both Lisa and me, even though no one in our family had any particular connection to the Anabaptist tradition. Or even Christianity, for that matter. I think they just had a blind hope that the Mennos would know how to straighten Lisa out. And keep me in line. That was the point of a private education. Public school meant giving your child up to chance and hoping he or she would come out all right, despite the odds. Private fixed the outcome with money. And luckily our parents had just come into some, thanks to a streak of deaths and promotions at work and in the family.

    Dad's manager at the RV plant died. When dad took over the position, he also got promoted in the esteem of mom's wealthy parents. They gave him an interest-free loan for a deposit on our new house, a two story set on a cul-de-sac at the edge of Maple City's first premium housing development, the Commons. Prior to becoming the Commons, the land had been nothing more than the long stretch of overgrown grass we drove past on our way from Cromwell to Shakey's Pizza. Now it was home. Lisa and I hated it almost as much as we hated each other. There were no kids our age. Just couples with toddlers, all in big houses connected by loops of paved white roads. Neither one of us could adjust. We only had a month to acclimate ourselves before school and we spent every day of it in Cromwell. Me at Woodlawn park, playing Alamo with my best friend, David, and the Mexican boys. Lisa at Tamra's, laying beside one another and poking each others' pooters, or whatever they did.
When school started neither Lisa nor I knew a soul in Maple City. Bethel Christian's administration had to assign us both what they called a peer pal, just to see we didn't get lost between classes. Mine was named Von Troyer. Von was a slight, soft boy with clear hair and short pants. He looked like he didn't eat much, but that when he did it was always something bad like cake or marshmallows. Like there was nothing substantial inside him, just paste. I mistrusted my peer. Figured any student willing to shepherd around a new guy had to be an outcast. I knew how it went.

    I played it real cool with him.

    "You can sit with me at lunch, if you want," said Von.  

    "That'd be cool," I said.

    At noon we went to the cafeteria for ham steak and corn-mush, took our trays outside and ate under a tree. Von asked me what I liked to do for fun.

    "Ever play Alamo?" I said.

    "No," said Von.

    "That's fun."

    "How's it work?" he said.

    "You get two balls. Like kick balls. And you form two circles, one around the other."

    "Yeah," said Von.

    "Center circle's the Alamo," I said. "Outer circle's the spics."

    "The what?" said Von.

    "Spicanos," I said.

    "You mean Latin Americans?"

    "No," I said. "I mean dishwashers."

    "That's culturally offensive," said Von.

    "What ?" I said.

     Von shook his head, took his lunch back inside before I could finish explaining the game. He didn't ask me any more questions about my likes or dislikes after that. In fact, Von barely talked to me at all from noon till the end of the day.

    But he talked to plenty of others about me.

    By the end of the day, I was known throughout my grade and the better part of my new middle school as Bill Huff, the racist kid.

    Lisa didn't say how her day went but I guessed from her stifled sobbing on our drive back to the Commons that it hadn't been much better. Next day we ate our lunches together on the tennis courts, cast out and fenced off, like kids in quarantine.

    "Everyone here blows," I said to Lisa, a half-eaten taco in hand.

    "No, you blow," she said. "Everyone here just figured it out fast."

    "Bitch," I said.

    Lisa smiled and nodded smugly. Told me to shut the fuck up.

    And so it went the rest of the week. Then the next. And the week after. Shuffling through classes with naught a friend nor foe, while being taught the Mennonite's pinko creeds on pacifism and modesty, their fag policies of inclusive language and cultural awareness, which formed out of their large missionary arm that sagged it's muscle all over god's globe. Their disdain for dancing. Their worship of pain. It seemed mom and dad had unwittingly given us over to the weakest, most cowardly sect in all of Christianity. One whose most sacred tome, right under the Bible, was the Martyr's Mirror, a thousand paged catalogue of gruesome deaths suffered by early Anabaptists, men and women who got their nads cinched off and eyes burned out for having beliefs counter to those of the Catholic church, beliefs that prescribed passivity, which in turn, allowed the torturous acts to be committed in the first place, then exalted the names of the tortured.

    It all seemed fucked to me. But no one cared what I thought. At school I was just considered the kid with a bad attitude and was systematically ostracized. At home I wasn't even considered. Mom and Dad were spending all their time on Lisa and her needs. My sister's eligibility to play basketball for the Mennonites was in question, on account of some rule in the game books. If our parents couldn't come up with a quantifiable reason for our move, other than the fact that it put us both in a better school system, Lisa would have to sit out a year of play, which meant she'd never play again, since it was her senior year. Lisa didn't really seem to care that much one way or the other. But Mom and Dad were crazy worried. They hired a lawyer, spent all their nights going over strategy.

    Somewhere around my fourth week of solitude and shitty school, I decided to teach everyone a lesson and become an alcoholic. Every day after Lisa dropped me off at home, I'd mix myself vodka-sprites in plastic tumblers and gulp them down till I passed out in my new room, pissed-pants drunk. But no one noticed. And, as it turned out, I hated alcohol. The way it made me feel all hot and sick inside. I wasn't teaching anyone anything, just ruining good soda. So it didn't take me long to quit the sauce and just go straight for the sprite after school. And instead of passing out, I forced myself to sleep. That was the best part of drunkedness anyway, the sleep. I was real good at it too. Until night came. Once it was dark I'd be all rested yet at the same time restless. Like a man who'd just woken from a long coma to find his blood had been getting pumped with black coffee. I needed to go.

    I started by walking around inside new house. Spying on everyone in their sleep like a perv. I felt like a stranger in the house. It'd already been a couple months and I still couldn't make the place mine. There were no marks of me anywhere. No dings or stains. I could barely work up the gumption to take a shit in the toilet. It was all so new and sparkling. Not like our old place, with the dingy green shag in the living room that I'd blow my nose on when I had a cold. This new place made me feel all foul and out of place. But it didn't seem to disturb anyone else so much. Mom and Dad both slept soundly, snuggling their pillows, spine to spine. Even angry Lisa slept peacefully at night. I tried to picture their dreams as I watched them but all I could see were my own. Me flying. Me falling.  Me rescuing a naked deaf-mute orphan girl, nobly giving her my shirt as I led her back to the old house in Cromwell, where we mutually decide to try and make a life together. Me sleeping peacefully in my old room.

    After watching the family snore in the dark like half dead things, I'd slip outside. Wander through our neighbors' back yards. Gawk up at the stars, waiting and wishing for just one point of light to unfix itself from the sky and fall on a Commons' house. Not killing anyone. Maybe just destroying a house that was under construction. One of the many unfinished homes on the fringe of the still-sprawling development. The type with no walls, just floors and frames. The type that looked like a skeleton house in the dark. Made for a skeleton family with little skeleton kids. All skulls and bones, white and gleaming as the new toilets in our house.
But none did. So instead I just forged my way through the clear plastic pieces sheathed over those skeletal frames and rummaged through the construction workers' things. Left behind utility belts and lunch boxes. Brown paper bags full of nails and screws. Caulk guns and empty lighters. Cigarette butts. The dirty carpenters were smoking in every house they made. Houses to which they'd never be invited, and if, for some odd reason they were, would certainly not be permitted to smoke. Just as I would not be permitted to piss all over the wooden grid of the unfinished walls or naked oak steps. We were just marking our territory while we could, the carpenters and me. Them during daylight hours and I during the night.

    But eventually everywhere came to feel like mine.

    The first finished house I entered was owned by a family called the Gordons. I could tell they thought that name was something special because they had it stenciled on their mailbox as well as, molded out of wrought iron and mounted on their front door. The Gordons. I walked up to take a better look at the name. Try to figure out what they saw there from the G to the S that made it worth displaying. Nothing I could tell, besides the fact that if you took out the ‘rd' it spelled Goons, which sort of described the type of people they were. Because only goons would leave their front door unlocked.

    Being inside the Gordons' house felt strange. But not because they were strangers. What felt strange was that it was just like being inside my own house. Like it wasn't mine and I didn't belong. Which, in a weird way, sort of justified my trespassing. Since this home was just as unhomey as the home I did not consider to be my home, it was just like being home. At least, that's how I figured it at the time, though not nearly as elegantly.

    The head of the Gordon house seemed a little like dad from what I could make of the pictures magneted to the fridge. Both were short and tired and always straining smiles. Mrs. Gordon looked happier than mom but maybe she was just medicated. Their two kids sure reminded me of me at their age. Little shits with hammy clueless smiles betraying no inkling of the disappointment ahead. Lucky goons. I swiped one of their family photos from the fridge along with the clock magnet/oven-timer used to keep the picture mounted. Then I tip-toed out of the house and spent the rest of the night up in my room playing with the timer, trying to get the clock started and stopped in less than ten milliseconds, which is only possible if you hit both buttons almost simultaneously. It took me the better part of the night just to get it stopped at twenty-eight's of a second.

    I caught up on my sleep at school, during my Old Testament class, which was right after lunch. The class was taught by Devon Schrock, a dour man who seemed old enough to have actually taken part in some of the later chapters of the OT. Devon had an in class policy of ‘baptizing' any student who fell asleep during one of his lectures. He kept a mason jar of fountain water on his desk at the ready for any such occasion. Prior to my entering the class, he claimed to have used it only three times in his long career as a teacher of god's word. Now he had to refill the jar weekly solely to douse my dumb head. But rather than being ashamed, I felt relieved by the baptismals. I came to think of myself as reborn everyday in Devon's class. Made completely new. Freed of any responsibility from my transgressions.

    Criminal every night and clean soul every day. I continued in this way for weeks, breaking into locked and unlocked houses, poking around strangers' belongings and grabbing all the clocks I could find. Clocks seemed to me  a good symbolic representation of my misery and misdeeds, although I can't remember what I thought they symbolized anymore.

    I took every sort I could find, from fancy-ass crystal mantle piece types to stopwatches junked away at the back of kitchen drawers filled with miscellany. Digital, roman numeral. The pretentious types with no numbers. Types with breeds of dog at every hour. The occasional cu-coo. I got them all. Displayed them around my bare-walled empty room like an exhibit of time itself. Clocks on the floor, under the bed, on the night stand, the window sills. My room was filled with all types of tiny tick-tocks, each marking its own little minute.  Funny thing, though. Hard as I tried I could never get all the clocks to synch up with each other. Seemed no one else could either. I never found two clocks in the same house that told the exact same time. Every room in every house I entered told a different one, which sort of made time seem like a silly thing. Or at least, the ways in which we kept it. Seemed truer to say time kept us.  It could really give two shits what hour and minute we said it was.

    
    Like when the time came for the Bethel Christian Maple Leaves' varsity girls' basketball team to play their first game and Mom and Dad had still not made a legitimate case for Lisa's eligibility. The game went on despite our parents' desperate and expensive efforts. We all watched from the bleachers together as the Leaves got blown away by a Methodist team from down state. Lisa cheered for the Methodists. All the BC families stared at us. I saw Von Troyer whisper something to his mother as she turned our way. I put my head down. Two kids were making out under the bleachers with their hands all up each other's sweaters. But no one stared at them.  
    
    The next day I let Lisa eat alone on the tennis courts. I had my lunch under the same tree where Von and I first ate together. Tried to imagine what it would have been like if we'd become friends.

    "Hey, Von," I imagined saying to Von, who was eating lunch in the cafeteria. "Saw you whispering into your Mommy's ear last night. You two are cute together."

    "Oh, shut up, Huff," I let Von say.

    "She still let you suck her titties? I bet she does."

    I imagined more friends sitting under the tree with us and shared my accusation. "Hey, everyone, Von Troyer still sucks his Mom's titties."

    Everyone started laughing. Von's face got real red.

    "Shut up, just shut up," he said.

    "Whoa, calm down there, Vonny. I was just having a little fun."

    Then Von broke down and started balling. "BUT I DO," he blubbered. "I DO SUCK MY MOM'S TITTIES."

    Everyone gasped. Von put his face in his hands and wept wild salty rivers down his arms.

    "Von, I had no idea," I said.

    "I'm so ashamed," he said.

    "Hey," I said, putting my arm around his soft shoulders. "It's okay."

    "You don't hate me?"

    "Of course I don't hate you. You're sick, Von. You need help, not hate."

    "Thanks. Thank you so much, Bill. You're such a bigger person than me."

    "I know," I consoled. "I know."

    Then I imagined we all played Alamo and I knocked every motherfuckers' head off.
   
    Later that night I actually did get to eat and talk with people for a change, when Mom and Dad took Lisa and me to Shakey's Pizza for a meat pie. It was the first time we'd all been out to dinner together since moving to Maple City. 

    "So," said Mom.

    "How is everyone?" said Dad.

     Lisa and I stayed quiet.

    "Billy," Mom said. "Made many friends at school, yet?"

    "All sorts," I said.

    Lisa shook her head.

    "I know we've been sort of out of it, lately," said Dad. "But I want you two to know it's because we love you."

    "Yeah, unconditionally," said Lisa.

    "Lisa," said Dad.

    "What?" she said.

    "We're doing this for you, actually," said Dad

    "To me," said Lisa.

    "Poor Bill's the one who's getting screwed in this deal."

    Suddenly, I felt very sorry for myself. I stared at my sister, now as a martyr.

    "Our lawyer thinks we have a chance to get you on the Leaves before the season's over."

    "Mmm," said Lisa.

    "If you're willing to talk to some people about the Charger's coach," said Mom.

    "What about her?" said Lisa.

    "That she's..." Dad paused and looked at me.

    "A strong feminine role model?" said Lisa.

    "Lisa, don't be difficult," said Mom.

    "Fuck you all," said Lisa. She left the table and ran into the bathroom.

    While she was gone, Mom and Dad apologized to me for their neglect. Asked what I thought about taking a trip to King's Island Amusement Park during summer vacation to make up for all I'd  gone through lately. I told them I thought that was a splendid start.

    And suddenly, I started to see what those Mennos saw in getting their nut sacks split open.

    Sympathy.

    And because I wanted to feel as though I'd actually earned my new-found martyrdom, the next couple nights I stopped breaking into people's houses. Pretended I'd been a perfect son ever since we moved. Not the spiteful pseudo-alcoholic thief and racist I really was.  Started reading all the crap assigned at school. Did homework. Even worked on an extra credit assignment in my Old Testament class. The assignment was to creatively represent an Old Testament story and then present it to the students. Devon gave me a list of ideas for what he meant by creative representation, none of which were very original. The list included:

• a mobile featuring moments in the life of Moses
• a first-person account of the trials of Job
• a story of Noah's ark as told by one of the animals
• a board game based on Exodus, Leviticus and/or Numbers
• a timeline of the major events in the life of David
• a dramatic reenactment of the sermons of Amos

   
    I opted to write the first person account. But after thumbing through Job, I decided I'd rather not tell his story. Job was just a dumb cad who liked to get shit on. And I couldn't muster any sympathy for a fool like that. Instead, I wrote the story of the fall of man from the perspective of the serpent. What intrigued me about this story was the fact that God made Adam and Eve ignorant nudists but gave the serpent wit and perception. My take on it from the serpent's slithering side was that he wasn't so much evil as he was lonely. I mean, here was this snake with a fully conscious mind who had no one but two blissed-out hippies to talk to all day. They probably didn't understand the snake's jokes, or the longing he felt. The envy of their perfect ignorance. Their naked bodies and companionship. The way I saw it, the serpent had no choice but tempt them. Otherwise, he'd live his life completely alone and misunderstood. And that would have made God the evil sadistic one, not the serpent.

    But Devon didn't agree.

    He returned my project with, "NO CREDIT. TRY AGAIN," written in red ink at the top. I never even got a chance to share it with the class.

    So, with very little pain or regret, I decided to refuse Devon's invitation and went back to sleeping in his class and walking into strangers' houses at night. It felt good to be evil again, after my brief respite. Even better than before. Because now I had the alternative to compare it to, and it was a frustratingly pointless, self-perpetuating one, where kids strove to do and say what they thought their elders wanted done and said, and were then commended for their lack of imagination. Made to believe they were becoming thoughtful mature adults when really they were just becoming ideas of what they thought adults should be. Most of them going on to embody those misguided notions so completely that they would live their entire lives with absolutely no sense of who they were or who they could have been.

    I, on the other hand, had figured those things out too soon. I knew exactly who I was and what I could be right there in the middle of my middle school career. I was Bill Huff, the racist kid and I was doomed to be me until the end of time.

    As was the owner of the last house I walked into univited.
   
    This last house was far from the Commons, near Maple City's southern limits. It was set in the middle of a large expanse of flat, still unused land. The night I walked to it was calm and free, the sky full of stars, the road clear of drivers. And a small breeze carried a faint scent of fall in the air, turning leaves and dewy fields of cut grass before the onset of their decay. The night was so beautiful it turned me a little Transcendental. (I knew this because I'd recently read some Emerson in English during my brief stint of scholarly dutifulness.) I started thinking maybe I'd just continue walking long as I could. See if there was any way I could make it to Cromwell by the next nightfall. I didn't even think about going into the house when I stopped at its driveway. I was simply tired and needed to rest, being new to Transcendentalism and all.

    I laid down on the front lawn for a minute, collected my breath and thought about big things. Life and Death. Heaven and Hell. God, Nature, Fate, Time. Love, Hope, Hate, Faith. Home. Or at least I tried to think about these things. Strained to even. But each one just led me to the same blank sensation. The only thing running through my mind for each being, ‘I don't know. I don't know. I don't know...' over and over again. Seemed these things were just like the sky full of stars. Distant, inscrutable, yet at the same time obligatory. And this thought both comforted me and made me feel more alone.

    So, I stopped thinking, lifted my arms above my head and stretched. Yawned. Closed my eyes tight, then opened them. Looked to the road and saw the big dark landscape spreading everywhere. Looked to the house and saw a door left slightly ajar. Got up. Walked through.

    Once inside I saw soft light reflected on the walls in slow undulating motions. And I heard water. Lots of it. Lapping against a hard surface. But the house seemed empty. Abandoned by life. There were things all about. The normal things you find in any house. A couch, a television, a coffee table. Phone left off the hook. But I couldn't  sense anyone's presence in them. Instead, they just seemed like things that were there. Useless, unused things. I wondered if the house was for sale. If the family had moved and left these things behind, like my parents had left our old banged-up dinner table and my bean-bag chair with the pee stains in our old house. But then I heard crying, or something like crying coming from the backyard. And I got very scared. Of all the houses I had entered, I had never once encountered another waking being.

    I would have left if this person had been doing anything besides crying. If they'd been getting a drink or taking a piss, watching some infomercial or reading a book, I would have run out the door and continued on my way to Cromwell. But the crying compelled me.

    I crept towards the kitchen window to take a look. Looked and saw a midget horse, blindfolded and tied to a diving board at a lit-up pool in the back yard. The beige- colored horse was quiet. The water, still. And there was no more crying. I thought maybe I'd just heard some horse noises because I couldn't see anyone else. I walked through the kitchen to the dining room and out the patio door to take a closer look. Looked closer and saw a half empty bottle of vodka floating in the deep end of the dirty pool. And a man, sitting in the shadow of the pool's  shed with his face in his hands. The man must have heard me walk out the patio door because he looked up and turned to me with no surprise. He yelled across the pool.

    "What are you?"

    I couldn't think of anything but the obvious. "A boy," I told him.

    "What are you doing here?"

    I didn't respond. I considered running as I stood there.

    "My wife send you? What she tell you? You the cops?"

    "No," I said. "I'm not the cops." The man was drunk.

    He planted his hand on the tiled ground and pushed all his weight into it like he was trying to get rid of the world. Fell. Got up and leaned against the pool shed. Threw up into his hand and wiped it on the shed wall.
"Fuck," he said.

    "I'm going to go," I said quietly to the horse.

    "I'm hurt," said the man.

    "What?" I said.

    "Horse kick," he said, then paused. "Pony kick." The man patted his head as he stepped out of the shed's shadow. He was in dark suit pants and a white oxford, which was misbuttoned and soaked with blood around the left of his collar, down to the breast pocket.

    The man looked blankly at me, then ran towards the little horse-pony and gave it a good shoulder to the ribs. The pony shook its head wildly. Neighed and stomped as the man fell onto the diving board and rolled off.
He sat up after a moment and looked at me again.

    "What the fuck you doing here?" he said.

    I clenched my fists and wished myself home.

    "My wife call you? I told her I'd do this. See."

    I did and I didn't. I saw everything, heard the troubled breathing of the pony, the small wet raspy exhales out of its nostrils. Smelled the faint scent of horse dung mixed with pool chemicals. Even tasted chlorine at the back of my throat. But I didn't really see any of it. Nothing registered as real. Not the full pool in the fall. Not the black stocking that covered the pony's eyes.

    "What'd you say, asshole?" the man yelled.

    "Nothing."

    "You talk to me, asshole? This is my house. Who said you talk to me?"

    I didn't even understand what he was saying anymore. I looked to the patio door. "I should probably get some help," I said.

    "Help me," he said.

    "Yeah," I said and turned to go inside.

    "Help me," he said again. "Help me," he screamed.

    The man started crying and kicking the little horse while sirens closed in on the other side of the house. Soon two tired-looking emergency men were holding down the bleeding man and looking at his kick wound. Shortly after that I was driven by a nice policewoman to the Maple City Sheriff's office for questions. They asked a lot, then released me to my parents.

    Mom asked the last of the night.

    "What happened?"

    But I couldn't answer. I had no idea myself. We all found out together the next morning in the police blotter of the Maple City News. The headline read, "Local Man Attempts to Drown Daughter's Pony in Ugly Divorce." There was a picture of the blinded beige pony tied to the diving board beside the article. I was in it too. A little off to the side, staring at the photographer with my mouth open.

    Lisa told me I looked like an idiot. Mom and Dad told her to be quiet and sent her off to school, alone. They let me stay home and rest for the day. Told me they loved me. Told me they understood my confusion. But the only thing I was confused about was what they understood. Both still seemed as clueless as ever. Still, I figured I should quit the clock business. Went to my room and packed them all away. All but the Gordon's clock-magnet oven timer, which I played with till lunch.

    After lunch I sat and tried to watch TV. But nothing interested me. I tried to read, but all the words in my books seemed wrong. Tried to sleep but I was no longer tired. So I just sat. Sat and thought. And it wasn't long before my mind turned to the drunken horse bully and how lucky I'd been to have witnessed him. How one in a million it was to have seen something like that. The beautiful breakdown of a man's life, the depraved bottomless bottom of his despair. I got to witness the ‘during' of what he'd forever consider his point of ‘before' and ‘after,' the moment of his lowest truth. If I lived my entire life ignorant of god and love, I'd at least have seen that. Which is probably more than you'll ever see.

    If I were a Mennonite, I guess I would have gone on to worship the poor pony the man beat up. Because it died a few days later from a combination of poison and heart strain. But if I had beliefs they'd be a little more pro-active than worshipping every unlucky victim that fell to a cause. My beliefs, if I had any, would have called for the pony to keep kicking its tormentor dead, as opposed to standing around and waiting for him to make it a martyr.

    But lucky for me, I don't have beliefs. I've never really been lost enough to need them.

    That summer I returned every one of my stolen clocks to their rightful owners. At least the ones small enough to send by post. Mailed them all from the hotel right outside of King's Island Amusement Park, during our last vacation as a family. Of course, Mom and Dad took me on other vacations later. But Lisa never came with us on any of them again. She was too busy being a lesbian at Ball State University, where she finally got to play basketball once more, although it was just on an intramural league for queers.

    Mom and Dad didn't tell me about my sister's gayness till I entered high school. When they finally did, I shrugged my shoulders.  Said, "Yeah." I'd known without knowing long before either one of them. And I wasn't really that interested. But my  buddy, Gil was. Gil was an exchange student from Tokyo. I overheard him tell his peer pal that he'd brought a good stash of Asian porn with him to America on his first day at Bethel Christian. This did not make him very popular with the girls and boys of Bethel Christian. But it brought us together. We'd hang out in my room every day after school. Teach each other about our respective cultures. Gil helped me get over my distaste for booze with hot Saki. In return I let him have some of my sister's old panties.

    Gil thought all lesbians were hot. And I really dug chink poon.
 

more fiction>>>

home