15Autumn

"15Autumn"

by

Timothy Stillman

It is autumn. The weather is cooling down. The sky is still blue, but it is somehow a friendlier kind of blue. And the world seems suffused with a golden glow. The wind is in its first hint of briskness. Everything seems cleaner when autumn starts its summer cleansing. The world seems friendlier, I suppose, because it is a season of corduroy and somberness, and I am a somber child. I am 15. I have, save as an infant and young child, when my mom had to bathe me and dress me and train me, not been touched by another human being.

I have not been held or had an arm around me in friendship. I have not had a friend, save my bulldog Ricky who loves me and who I love beyond words. I am what is known as a good boy. I do not run across other persons' lawns, I do not get in fights, I do not curse. The word "goddam" floated through my head the middle of summer and I knew I would go to hell for it. I am just now getting over it and have not apologized to God for a little while. He doesn't seem particularly to care one way or the other, but it still bothers me.

I go to church, sometimes willingly, I am in the school band, unwillingly, I have been a Cub Scout and am now a Boy Scout, both very unwillingly. I am a chronic masturbator. I think of it all the time. I was born with one testicle, the left one, not descended. It was not destined to descend until I was 14. Mom took me on regular visits to the doctor, a constant smoker, even when examining me, his face lined with huge creases and furrows, a man who frowned constantly and whose eyes seemed always half closed, because the smoke hurt them. And he, my first pronouncer of judgment, incessantly wreathed with blue fog, like I imagine the devil would look, with leathery dark skin as well, and a cigarette left always smoldering in his ash tray while he was touching me, then picked up and puffed on again when he was through with me. He seems efficient and passably kind. It is embarrassing his hands feeling my groin looking at me down there I write this sentence in a rush to get it down and hopefully to the back of my mind. The office smells of starch, cigarettes, whiteness, the end of the road, alcohol, medicine, fear, sickness, stuffy cotton wadded in every pore of air. And there is the creak this way and that of the chair on rollers he sits on to examine me.

My mom would not let me ride a bicycle until my testicle descended. The doctor said I could ride a bike, it will not hurt me, but she insisted it would. Therefore I have spent my summer days, until last summer, (when the testicle finally showed its face), sitting in our side yard, watching children bike past, and me, wishing, wishing. My life has been spent doing that, wishing. I wish I could stop. After the magic day of testicle propriety arrived, (you would think I'd remember when, but I don't, or how I told my mother, or how the doctor did, important thing, a vital thing, why is it a blank to me?) she bought me a bicycle, and the man from the MYF taught me to ride. Which involved putting me on my black Schwinn at the top of the hill and then pushing me down that hill to the street that went by my house. I went down it propelled unable to stop and ran over the curb to my yard and hit a tree. I could have been killed several ways in this. The man thought it was amusing. I can ride fairly well now. No thanks to him. Thanks only to embarrassing training wheels and falling off a lot.

I am polite, yes ma'am, no ma'am. I am a solitary child. I have been made to feel guilty for everything, from reading comic books, to reading paperbacks, to watching TV, to writing very bad screenplays of my favorite books. I have decided, most unlike me, not to be guilty about masturbation, though I am, terribly. I fool myself however. I masturbate, in summer, three or four times a day. With my testicle now at home plate, the pain of it is agonizing, when I masturbate. A searing sharp stabbing pain and waves of feeling like there is a weight of sand in my groin, pushing down toward gravity, goes through it for a long time, but I masturbate anyway, even during the rush of pain. It is God's justice. This I know. For Those Who Know Best tell me so. In a manner of speaking.

I do not think of having sex with another human being. It does not cross my mind. This is my private world. I do not know if other boys do it. I will read about circle jerks later on in my life and wish (here's that wishing again) I could have been a part of that. But boys who would like that sexually and not just as another peeing contest would be drummed out of the group pretty quickly I imagine. This past summer, one night, our scout leader was called away. We were meeting that night in the basement of the Methodist church. He said we could go home or play some basketball if we wanted. I was off in my solitude as always. The boys decided to play strip poker. I thought they were kidding, I thought something violent and dangerous was about to happen. I was petrified. They brought the cards out, sat in a circle, right under the sanctuary and began playing. By the time Jack had his kerchief and shirt off, I all but ran for the door and ran all the way home. They were invading my territory, I guess, they were making fun of something that was so sacred to me, so solemn, not meant for their laughter and joking and cursing. Mostly I was just frightened and have come to these conclusions later on.

The first time I masturbated I was 10 or so. I was taking a bath. My penis got stiff. It was so small and pink and young and sweet looking. At fifteen, it no longer looks like that, and I miss it being as it used to. Just thwong that particular bath night, and there it was. I approached it most fearfully at first, (is this a part of me?) somehow knowing already this in itself was wrong. It was like an alien invader come to say let's have a bit of fun. It almost loomed in front of my startled little blue eyes. I rubbed a wash rag over it. It felt enormously good, comforting, warm, exciting, I had never had such a feeling, I did not want it to go away. I washed it with soap and washcloth and water and I rubbed it till the good feeling felt tingly and my entire body felt lit up like a Christmas tree. My legs bucked. My hand was soapy and fast and I breathed so quickly. Panting. When I dry came, knowing nothing about any of this, other than it felt fantastic, my penis started having deep stabbing pains in it. Though I did it a number of times again with soap and water through the years, and still do sometimes, the pain was/is worth it, it made up for me having fun. I never have fun. It is wrong. And if I forget myself and do, then I am made to pay for it dearly afterwards.

I think about masturbating all day in school, but cannot get an erection then, though I've later read boys get erections all the time, I did not, not around other persons, because I do not like people because they do not like me because I do not like them, and so forth. I love the feeling of rushing home from school, being alone in the house, going into the bathroom, locking the white paint chipped bathroom door, though there is no need for it, and entering my private sex world. Usually my mom goes to work before I get home from school, but when she's running late, I always wait half an hour to do it, because when I started just as soon as she left, she always came back because she "forgot something." She loves to catch me in the act. It gives her a chance to cry. I am more careful now.

I love getting naked in front of the bathroom mirror. I am already six feet tall. I am skinny. I have dark sparse pubic hair, rather fluffy. I cannot remember when it started coming in. Just as I cannot remember when I first started shooting. I think these are important to remember, but it all blends together. Shyness and fear do not help me remember. I am circumcised. I do not have chest hair. The hair on my head is cut short, much shorter than I would like it. In university I will grow it long and it has been long ever since. In those days to come I will want to look like David Cassidy, and will pretend that I do. I will starve myself into almost anorexia to complete my best semblance of the illusion. To myself at least. Writing this, I will still remember all the lyrics to the signature song of the Partridge Family. "I think I love you/so what am I so afraid of?/ I'm afraid that I'm not sure of/a love there is no cure for..." And a lot of the others as well.

I love standing naked and vulnerable and a child still, with my back to the mirror over the pink vanity table, and looking over my shoulder at myself in the light airy bathroom with the high windows the sun comes through brightly in days like this, the autumn days that are shading their way to leaden skies and colder winds that light my way so dearly and make me so nostalgic for what is already here and seemingly already going away. I pretend that I am another boy looking at me, over his shoulder. I hug myself and touch myself everywhere, someone has to after all, and pretend another boy is hugging me. Not a "real" boy because the idea of them runs into my dichotomy of the real world that I hate, and a land where even the thought of those of that world cannot enter. I think of boys in movies and TV shows, the "unreal" boys who are beautiful dreams and hearts and hands that hold me and never let me go. I wish someone would touch me. I wish someone would put his arm around my shoulder. I wish someone would give a damn about what I think about things. I wish they would pretend to at least. I wish I could stop wishing.

I have a small butt. Somewhat flat. At this time of day, red marked from all the sitting I do in school on those hard wood slatted seats. Like my face is sometimes creased by my pillow when I have an especially heavy sleep on it. I stroke myself, looking down at myself. I turn round to face the mirror. I kneel. I hide my hard penis between my thighs and let it bounce back. I look at my torso closely. I think it is not too bad to look at. I stroke my body. I hold my arms round myself. I try to make me not me. I mimic kissing someone and someone kissing me in return. I never ever expect this to happen in reality to me. I am learning to live with it. I do not think I would like it if it did. But I want it to regardless.

My penis rises. It sticks straight out. I can drape a towel over it and it remains rigid. I wish I could show that to someone. It is pale and it has little wispy veins in it. I love to make it spring up. To hold it down almost flat against my balls and then let it thwack upward. I love feeling my little warm hairless balls that are still tight against me. I love putting my hands all over my groin, pulling my penis left and right, very happy it is mine and always will be mine, why did God make such a sinful thing so fun?, and tickling my fingers up my almost hairless legs. What would I do without these rituals to see me through? I pull a fuzzy bathmat from the tub rim, I take a mirror from over the vanity table, and put it against the wall beside me. I hold the mirror to me, and starting with my face, let the mirror see all of me a little at a time. Then I lie on my stomach on the rug and rub delicately my hard on on the rug. I get turned on by seeing my naked body doing this. I've begun to masturbate this way because my mom says I will give myself cancer rubbing it with my hand. I do not know if she means on my penis or my hand or both. Seeing my body swaying up from and onto the rug excites me tremendously. I examine from the side view all of me carefully. I pat my hips and wiggle them. My hard on tight against my belly when I rise up, my balls hanging down a bit, and then flattened to the rug, penis feeling deliciously sexy as the fuzzy rug takes it and my tummy when I go down. I hold to invisibility. I give it a name.

In the movie, years later, "The Cement Garden," the incredibly good looking boy is also a chronic masturbator, and is told by his mom that every time he does that filthy thing, so many pints of blood, are used up, that the body had to manufacture more of it, which could lead to his killing himself that way. But he winds up fucking his sister so for a tiny little while things are okay for him. Forget the police car outside with its bright lights going round and round on them on the bed.

I love to pretend there is vaguely someone under me as I masturbate. I think vaguely of another boy's penis, though I've never seen one in person, penis I mean, because in the showers in gym or at the muny pool, I never allow myself, get dressed fast, get undressed fast, get dressed again, and then get the hell out of there with as much tunnel vision as I can muster. I do not know I am miming fucking here in the cool darkening layer of light. I would not have done it that way if I had. I was still trying to be a good boy. Why rubbing my penis against the rug would not give me cancer I never thought of.

The bathroom mat feel to me is like being a baby on a soft blanket. Crooned to. Far away lullaby. Sad songs. I feel so good naked. My flat butt in the air as I go up and down, just fucking away--man, that devil just gets in any way he can, doesn't he? I pretend I am teaching a boy how to masturbate. This is all so nebulous with me. I am pretending that he is fascinated by the lessons. I do not touch him. He does not touch me. This is how it is with me. I do not picture a boy actually, not even an "unreal boy" exactly. I picture a concept of one far away from me, because that makes the guilt less. For some time I have been masturbating just for the act of it, just for the good feeling of it. Like the indescribably beautiful blonde boy I would see later on in "You Are Not Alone" who masturbates in bed on his stomach, a few thrusts, then his mouth goes "ah" with pleasure and he is comfortably within himself and needs, for a time, no one else, and falls to dreams, not knowing he himself is a dream.

I take time to lie on my back. Sometimes I put baby powder on my chest and my groin and my butt, because I like the smell of the powder. I play with my tits. I pinch them. I run my hands down my abdomen and I feel my cock which is the average size and will get no larger. I love how it lies on my abdomen like a little marble monument. I love feeling my balls. I try to make my left ball by force of will not hurt when I am through, though I know it will. I keep thinking my penis and balls are not mine. That someone will take them away from me soon. God, maybe. It will continue, that left testicle, to hurt, until I am 17 or so. I think now it did this often because I always held the cum inside because if I did not cum then it did not count as masturbation and so I was free of sin. But the guilt was the same. I spilled some a few times. It stained the bath mat. I was unable to scrub it away. My mom cried big time over that when she took the mat washing day. She made me promise never ever to do that again. I promised. But even a good boy like me could not keep that one. I tried though. I honestly did. I absolutely despise the label of good boy. It's mean and cruel and the worst thing you can make a person be. While everybody else is seemingly having such a good time.

I have no idea, but I suppose I could have damaged myself holding in the cum. There is a boy across the street who visits his grandparents here every July. I am in love with him. I try to imagine him naked. I try to imagine having sex with him. I saw him one day walking down the street, from my attic window, the attic is my favorite place to hide, and I took off my clothes and tried to make love to him, with that image, but could not even get hard. This makes me feel good and bad. Like telling him he wasn't so much after all. Love is a curious business. I did not know how curious it was about to become, as they write at the end of chapters that are meant to be cliffhangers..

I feel good and free and sinful (payment to come a little later on) on my back as I rub my butt on the mat, while I stroke my penis for a time, this way. I use the first two fingers of my left hand. I barely touch it. Later on, I decide, I will again use soap and water to masturbate, regardless of the pain because it makes my penis slippery and the lather makes it seem somehow more important and bigger in ways I can't explain.

There is the familiar feeling of a door opening inside my stomach as I came closer and closer to coming. I look down at myself, looking at my penis about to go off, and wonder how it can just look so rigid and firm with all the fireworks going on in there. I feel the tingle in my thighs and upper body. I feel how it would be to be a beautiful boy and how grand it would be to look in the mirror and find not my frightened almost immobile most assuredly unsmiling face but a pretty or handsome one staring back at me, happy to be. The river takes me. I look at my face, tense, eyes wide, mouth open, and pull hard on my penis with my left hand. I am a lefty though a teacher tried to fix that and failed. Which makes my class room work difficult, because all school desks are made for right handed kids.

When I was little, I liked to sit on the couch at night and watch TV and masturbate. I would wear my pajamas and my robe, and I would play with my penis, rub it against the flannel or cotton material, take it hard out of the opening of my briefs and my pajama bottoms. To be out there in the living room. It seemed so wrong and wonderful. When I first discovered this wondrous thing I could do to myself, I was suffused with warmth, the first time in my life. I could give myself pleasure. And how amazing that is. Once, I was watching a Western on TV. There was a scene of Indians in loin cloths, dancing round a campfire. I went to the set, got flat on the floor, and looked up at the screen, trying to see under the loin cloths. I remember being very disappointed I could not.

I spread my legs as my penis gets harder and harder and I open my eyes and look at the dingy plaster ceiling. I feel like my whole body is quivery with anticipation of life, minnow lights dart between my closed eyelids, my breath is hard and fast. As though my body has been through a long day at school and is happy now and grateful I am here, that I am pleasuring it. I think of none of me as me. It holds me to itself as a visitor.

I rub my chest and my pinch my tits (titty twister!) and with my right hand, my very hated right hand that could not be normal, I rub my balls softly, especially the left one. Sometimes at this moment, at the beginning of this epic crest, I will say in whispers "I love you, Barry. I love you, honest and true." Because no one has ever said that to me. Not one single person. Not even has anyone said they liked me. Because no one does. It would be a lie if they did say that. And the truth is always good for you. That's what the Pastor says and I keep it in mind. Mom and teachers say variations of that too. How brave and sturdy and strong they must be to live in truth and reality all the time. What is it like to be among them and one of them and to know just how to handle everything and have these sayings, like chants to ward off evil, that cover all the questions? I can't begin to imagine. I am tired of being lonely.

I look at my legs, I open and close them, boy scissors, which are well formed and strong looking. I watch the muscles catching and letting go. I watch myself in the side mirror. I watch my hand on my dick which I am fairly proud of because I don't think it looks so bad, and then the moment, then the rushing of me in myself as though someone in my body has a train to catch and is running for it as fast as they possibly can, and I stream upward like there are doors opening all in side me and the world of sex and love and comfort and compassion come darting swooping in, and my penis tries to squirt, and I hold the slit hole closed and my penis seems to be choking on cum that it gulps back down, and I love the feeling, and I feel the pain in my left testicle, my tormentor, my chastiser, I fear God lives in my left ball, as it begins almost immediately, a lacerating

thing that has started to leave me with a dull throbbing for hours. I have begun to think of that pain in a sexual way as well.

Sometimes I masturbate before going to MYF or the scout meeting, so the pain is strong within me and I feel sexy with the dull throb in my ball and think if these other kids knew that I was having this pain and that it hurt so much and why it hurt so much, they would be impressed. I know they would. But now after just almost coming, I begin to weep. I always weep after I masturbate. It makes me feel good to start up the stairs to coming. The thing itself is a blessed moment. The weeping then must always follow. It is not even questioned. Because I feel lonely then, because I'll always be just me and no one and nothing else ever. I lie there for fifteen minutes or so usually and let the sadness out, but there is always a residue of it in me that stays and stays.

At about my junior year in high school, I will do this: I will come to the house, empty and hollow, both of us, as usual, I will go to the kitchen and get an extremely dull butcher knife from the drawer, and I will go into the living room, after shutting all the window blinds, to the corner of it where my bulldog slept until he was put to sleep which still tears my heart out, I miss him so. I will take the bathroom mirror and put it against the wall by the easy chair. I will take off my clothes. I will lie on the mustard yellow carpeting, get a hard on, masturbate with my hand because I no longer care if I get cancer from it. I still will not let the sperm out though it taps harder and harder on the door I hold closed, and when I'm through, I do this in haste and hurry, eager to get to the new part of my ritual which is this:

I will lie naked there, and put the tip of the butcher knife to my neck, to the artery on the left side, I will be lying on my back, my shrinking bobbing penis feeling good, my left ball beginning to throb, and I will push the dull bladed knife without a handle into my neck. I never push hard. I never break the skin. Even if it could break the skin. It just makes me sleepy. And usually I sleep for half an hour or so. When I wake, I put my clothes on, take the knife to the cutlery drawer, slide it in, close the drawer, put the mirror back in the bathroom and start on my homework, wanting to get through in time for a favorite TV program or two. Or a chapter or two of a book I am not forced to read. Which I consider the real books. Then bed. I cry myself to sleep. Like always.

I will perform this ritual every week day or thereabouts for the rest of my junior year at high school and some of my senior year. I have learned that wanting to die makes me live with more gratitude for it. I've never read that from anyone else but it holds true for me. It makes me feel most alive. And of course that is another abnormality of my vast library of abnormalities. They should call me Anomaly, I think. I will lie in my bed, while a couple of lonely whistle trains pass by a few blocks away in the late night. Hearing them, asleep or awake, they make me feel better.

It is however not that time yet. I am 15. I am finished masturbating. I do not know other words for it. Masturbation sounds like a clinical curse. I am comfortable with it because it sounds sexy to me as well as something you can look up in a dictionary which gives it a bit of credibility. I am a voracious reader already. I am in the process of finishing "The Carpetbaggers" by Harold Robbins. There are some incredibly sexy passages in it. A girl masturbates a boy and holds a handkerchief out to catch the cum. A little while from now I will read "The Hand Reared Boy" by--as they say-- respected-- science fiction writer Brian Aldiss. It will be the hottest book I have read. It is all about sex. It is about especially a young boy being seduced by his lovely young aunt. There's even a "Maginot Line" of jerking off at the boy's boarding school that is so massively hot. When I read of Maginot Lines in school history books, that passage of boys jerking off comes to me. Now that kind of war would be really worth participating in. I recommend most strongly it to our glorious leaders.

Hand Reared means jerking off, by the way, in that usual stuffy way British have of saying things that somehow makes them always seem filthier. There are also some novels I read now about another young man and his young aunt and her initiating him. I especially love the title of one of them--"The Trembling of a Leaf." I imagine myself both the woman and the boy. This does not confuse me. I do not know that I should be confused.

I am sporadically getting a little braver about reading books my mom does not know about. But I've a long way to go. To this day I never read anything without feeling guilty about it.

On my 16th birthday, my mom will let me buy my first issue of "Playboy" (I have never so much as looked through one before) and I will find the pictures of naked women so beautiful and I will masturbate to them often, imagining me as their son or kid brother, but I also will like the stories and articles a great deal, so when someone makes a joke about some jerk who buys the magazine for the stories, consider me the one person in the world for who that is true.

It was then a handsome magazine, had a good feel and quality and look to it. I will read "Octopussy" serialized in it and new Ray Bradbury stories and Jean Sheppard, it will all be quite wonderful. In the December of my senior year, I will have a letter to the editor published in it. The Christmas issue. The very best one. How odd to see my name and my words in "Playboy." Like I had actually accomplished something. Even my mom will be a little confusedly proud of me.

It will be so weird reading those magazines, while my mother does housework around me. It makes us both nervous as hell. I of course do not look at the pictures until I'm alone. My letter will make me famous for a day at school. For a day I will not be invisible. For I am, the rest of the time. I am part of the woodwork. I make advances on no one. I manipulate no one. I never put the make or the moves on anyone. I just keep hoping so much someone will some time put the moves on me. I long for it and boys aren't supposed to long for anything.

I will later on in life know some persons who treat other people terribly, use them like human accu- jacs, and they get away with it and it seems a pretty rotten thing to me. Envy in me for them? Yes. Anger in me at what they will get away with, that somehow or other I will have to pay for their own goddam sins? Absolutely.

At 15, in mid October, naked and spent, I feel the cool late afternoon wind blowing through the little spaces uncaulked between the wall and the windows as the sunlight gets less, in the bathroom. I am not perspiring like I do all summer long. We do not have air conditioning. Now, though, I feel chilly. It makes me feel more naked somehow.

This is the first moment then of true Fall. Welcome, old friend. I've survived just for you. I feel good. I feel my testicle paining and that too is good. Later on before it gets full dark I will ride my Schwinn through the neighborhood, up to the hill a few miles away, lay down carefully the bike in the grass and go up to the top of the hill already browning, the formerly bright green grass, and I will look down at the houses, like I would later read Allison Mackenzie did in Grace Metalious' "Peyton Place"--the ultimate paper back of its time, one I was not allowed to buy by mom for obvious reasons. I coveted that Dell paperback. It never occurred to me to buy it anyway and read it. Like it never occurred to me to buy "Playboy" without her permission. It was only years later I finally will find a falling apart copy of the book in the 4th Dell issue, but with the same haunting art work and photos on the front and back covers as the earlier issues. I treasure it among my most prized possessions. I will pay fifteen dollars for it. It will be quite simply worth every penny.

Other books she would not let me read, "The Shrinking Man" by Richard Matheson, because she found the word "breast" in it, (she scanned them before I was allowed to get them) but since he was one of my favorite writers, I insisted, so she let me have it, but put it in her own book case so I could only read it when I was more "mature." How I was supposed to get mature this way was never made clear to me. She would also not let me read the novelization by Irving Schulman of "West Side Story." She looked through it at the grocery paperback rack, found the word "breast" (she really had a thing about that word) in it, so it was off limits till my sixteenth birthday, and even then she did not want me to read it. It disappointed her that I did. She gave in and bought me the soundtrack to this film that she saw with me, the first film that I fell hopelessly in love with, but let me listen to it only after she had gone to work. Crazy, right? Yes.

After all, the word "breast" cropped up in none of the lyrics. For the terrible trio in "Summer of '42" the word that kept cropping up was "foreplay." For me it was "breast." She wouldn't let me buy the Monarch paperback novelization of my favorite big monster movie, "Gorgo" because--yep, that damned word "breast" again--there is no sex at all in the movie, but they added it to the book to sell more copies. I would eventually spend thirty five dollars for a mint condition copy of it. Again money well worth it. I would hold it in my hands and weep, like I had sent myself a little postcard from my childhood that said "I remember you; be well."

I lie there naked for a few more moments, a distance of time and place inside me growing. Feeling myself up. Pretending that a boy concept is feeling me up. Then, later on, pretending an "unreal" boy for real. And in time, pretending a concept, then an "unreal," then a real girl is. Pretending they are both doing it at the same time and they are kissing and I get to watch them do "it," whatever it is that boys and girls do in the first place. At this age, I think I am solely a homosexual, though I am not sure what that means. I will think this for a long time. Until sexuality becomes more diffuse to me, more fluid, unboxable, not even the boxes I put myself in will fit after a time.

So in my fifteenth year, I dress that afternoon. I put on my BVDs slowly and my jeans and shirt, looking at me covering up my body. A strip show in reverse. Me putting on the fake/real me again. Last birthday, my mom bought a movie camera, and one night when I was just getting out of the bath tub, she barged in the bathroom and started filming. I put the towel in front of me. I squirmed. I was so embarrassed, and she showed that damn film to anyone and everyone, including the boy across the street who came to visit his grandparents every summer, the boy I loved who laughed at me and never let me forget it. She showed it to his grandparents and her friends as well. That makes me laugh now. She could have been charged today with making kiddy porn.

This summer, she had this medical book on traumas and birth defects and injuries, all involving children; she worked at the local hospital. One Sunday afternoon, I was watching TV, trying not to think about school tomorrow, and she opened the book to a photo of a girl naked, legs spread, who had been horribly burned on her legs and vagina. She came to me, and put the picture right up to my face.

I ran from her when I saw the picture she was showing me, she followed, carrying the book, I ran up the attic stairs, she right behind me, I ran to the rocker by the windows where I read my comic books and paperbacks and got into my own dream world. I doubled over. She came to me and forced with one hand my hands from my eyes. She made me open them. She made me look up, and she stuck the picture so close to my eyes the photo was blurred and nonsensical. I thought I was looking at the picture of a scream.

She held my head and I could not look away. I looked and looked, pretending I could see, until she was satisfied. Everything was horribly silent grim and still. I did not look at my mother's face. Not a sound in the world happened in those moment. And, then, she took the book away, closed it, held it by her side, and told me to get dressed for my MYF meeting, as she went back downstairs. I sat trembling after she left and sick at my stomach and God was suddenly a long way away. I cried into my hands. I couldn't stop thinking of that terribly hurt little girl and why such a thing had happened to her. How did it feel? How did it feel?

Mom called up the stairwell for me to get dressed. And I went downstairs and did as told She never did do anything like that again. I have no idea why she did it at all. I am glad she is dead now.

I don't want to remember anymore right now. Though I have no say so in the matter. Leave it as this. It is autumn. I am dressed. My heavy socks and leather shoes. I put on my jacket. I go out into the cool afternoon. I get on my black Schwinn. No one else is around. I feel good and complete and full and tall and with a momentary right to live on this planet like everyone else. My left testicle throbs. I kick up the silver kickstand and ride my charger out of the garage and onto the red pebbled and rocked alley. The sky is darkening. The wind grows cooler. I shall ride through it as a swimmer through water, as I rode to school and home today too. The outdoors seems finally like the outdoors again, instead of the extension of the interior of my house, the way it feels in summer. There is a hugeness to the outside now, a safe gray dark metallic hollowness, that seems vast even in the little distance from my yard to the house across the street where my summer friend lives in July.

Shadows have begun painting the houses around me. Lights have come on in some of them. Lights that are somehow meant to welcome the night coming in, instead of keeping it out. Windows are open. The first cool wind of autumn. So beloved. I ride to the street, feeling free and into Fall and winter one more time, against the cool deliverance of wind onto the street and then turn left by the July home of the boy I love, and onto the street up the rise to the hill where I will contemplate the houses below me. Then I will ride home and do my homework. And the night will be peaceful. My mom will be home at eleven ten that night, as always, save for her two days off. I will pretend sleep. I will have turned the TV off by nine, the time set by her. I will hear her walk to the set, and know she is feeling the top, and god help me if it is still warm. She will watch TV in the living room. I have my back turned to the television, as I lie in the doorless sunroom adjoining it. I mask the sound somehow. Because I know she would want me to. She will turn on The Tonight Show. I have occasionally heard her laugh at it. It chills me, that laugh, though it is a very normal seeming one.

I will, tonight, have open one window in my sunroom bedroom and autumn will trickle in, somber and sweet and full and rich and dark and friendly and kind and still and deep and welcoming. I will weep soundlessly, before she gets home. Weeping then makes me feel as if someone else might be there one day. That they will be sad it was like this for me. And maybe that it was like this for them as well. And I can be sad for them, too.

I will drift off to sleep. A train will come by at ten thirty or so, with a whistle to keep me company and I will dream my dreams till blessedly cool morning, that makes even school endurable, when the sun will rise, though less in its lion power than the day before, and everything will all start again. But in a different tone and tempo. Life feels good to me now. I look forward to the golden autumn apple sunlight, as I ride my bike on the mirrors of the night streets.