you are four years old, and your mother paints your nails. hers match yours, a fiery red, and it is the prettiest thing you have seen in all your life. the paint chips when you go out to play, dirt pressed into the cracks, and you cry. you wish pretty things didn't break.
you are six years old, and on the run, and your father puts you in a dress to throw off the cops. "your hair is girly enough," you havent had it cut in a year and it hangs soft around your ears, and you take it as a compliment. he burns it as soon as you cross the state line.
you are twelve years old, and the teacher puts you in the role of bet canty for the school rendition of prince and the pauper. the costumed rags are not dissimilar to your overlarge shirts, hanging off you like the ripped to shreds dress of the role. you are desecrating a grave on opening night. "you don't want to be an actor, son," your father tells you when you bring it up. (when did you decide that?)
you are seventeen years old, and your id is too fake to hold up in a dive, but the barkeep tells you your eyes are pretty, and gives you a drink on the house. the man in the bathroom speaks the same of your lips. as a picture, says the one out back. your father sends you out alone, to the graves of nuns, and you think nothing pretty can hold such violence under its skin. your father knows this, he is telling you this. he knows.
you are nineteen years old, and you are studying, and rhonda hurley dresses you all up pretty in pink. you are a boy, not yet a man, so you think it might be alright. you are pretty, and you are perverse, and this means nothing, and you hold on to the memory of soft soft satin until you are dead several times over. you hide it in the bottom of a duffle forgotten three motels ago.
you are thirty years old, and masculinity is a performance you put on at the bar when a trucker calls you sissy. it is a mask you wear when your brother sees you soft. it is a shield and a spear both, and it is the house in which you live, with a neverending lease. it is a collar, and it chokes.
you are fourty years old, and you burn the body of a man in a skirt with fire and brimstone raging in the blacks of his eyes. he was a casualty, unsaveable. irredeemable. he was him and he was wonderful and he killed seven men and ate their corpse. he was possessed. he was dead at your hands as is everybody else. he was alive.
you are four years old, and your mother is dead in a fire. you are fourty years old, and so are you.
