credit: Sarah Ahmad
| / ^ \
Alan Stewart Carl
Spring 2010
Spring 2010
Rowan ran away from me on our way home from basketball practice. Vanished in the mesquite between the football field and the train tracks. Right after I tried to kiss him.
I called his name. Searched the brush. Found cigarette butts and little plastic baggies and a three of clubs with a picture of a naked Japanese man masturbating.
I kept the three of clubs.
The Japanese man looked a lot like Rowan. And like me. At least in the place where his fingers touched. I carried the card in my front pocket so he could rub against me all day.
I once said to Rowan, “I like you so much I want to shrink you down and put you in my pocket.” And he said, “I don’t believe in that sort of thing.” He didn’t believe in kissing either. Or holding hands. But he once sucked me off in the mesquite and then pretended it never happened.
Rowan was gone for two days after he ran away. I wrote his name on my left thigh. Deep. The pen making me bleed. I tried to show it to him when he returned to school, but he’d quit the basketball team. And he didn’t look at me when we passed in the halls.
I waited for him between the football field and the tracks. I waited until the sun set. I looked at the Japanese man on the three of clubs. He was better looking in the dark. Legs spread. Wanting. “Don’t touch me,” Rowan had said. But the Japanese man said nothing. He let me do what I wanted. Come on his face until the paper wrinkled and bits of color flaked away. And he no longer looked like a person at all.
There are still marks on my leg from where the pen punctured deepest. It says | / ^ \ . My wife once asked me what it stood for. I said it was Japanese. But I’d never figured out what it meant.