Everybody said it was my mother threw acid on my face because I was born freak ugly from the start. But it was never her. It was one of her junkie boyfriends she had back then. The one called himself Uncle Danny. I was already six and not a baby anymore. And it wasn’t acid. It was cooking oil. The scars are from wet burns, not chemicals. Everybody just talks a lot of shit because everybody’s got nothing else to say. It’s just what they do. They only know whatever they know and it’s always less than they think. They talk a lot of shit about me and Maisie, but it’s never what they say.
Never.
I fell in love with Maisie Jones the first time I saw her lying on the floor in Eddie Waller’s garage, naked, legs splayed open like a broken pair of angel wings and her pussy glistening from the first three boys in line. I learned a long time before this it was better not to lay out any hope on girls who were pretty. I knew Uncle Danny cut me out of that world the first time a girl looked at my face like a car crash her mother was in. But Maisie … even if I didn’t know what it was, I knew she was made out of something else.
Early on I took to wearing baseball hats. They didn’t cover all that much of my ugliness, but they made it so I didn’t have to look people in the eye and vice versa. It’s probably better people don’t look each other in the eye so much anyway. You can see too much of what somebody’s thinking, and I’ve never seen much good come of that.
It might’ve been well enough to go around with just the burn, but by the time I was sixteen I was six-four and counting. With a body like a dump truck and a face like week-old roadkill you don’t belong in a world of pretty business. So I stayed away from school as much as I could get away with. I started going to the library. You could read more books there anyway, and you could read what you please. Nobody was trying to sell you ideas about what you’re supposed to be interested in or good at. It was a better education than school.
If I wasn’t in the library I’d walk around town at night or go off in the woods during the day. Sometimes there’d be animals and certainly plenty of birds. None of them cared about me one way or another. One day I found a fox suffering in a trap with a bloody foot. It was breathing fast and looked panicked when I came up on it. We studied each other a while and I knew it was too afraid of me to want me touching it. It was beautiful and pitiable. I didn’t know enough about animals to know if the foot would ever heal, but it was the first time I ever saw anything like myself in any other creature.
The only other foxes I ever saw were free and far away, keeping to their own. I had a feeling she’d try to defend herself if I tried to help her free. She was just a little thing in my estimation. And every time my eyes lay down on that clutch of metal jaw around it’s leg I felt an inexplicable rage fire through my blood.
I took a bottle of water out of my backpack and knelt down. Poured some on the trapped foot, then on the animal’s mouth. She lapped out with her tongue, scooping in as much as she could. After that I lay my hand over her neck and felt her wild breathing. Her throat vibrated with a low growl but I just kept my hand there, steady, not hard enough to hurt her, only enough to let her know I had the strength to break her neck should such a thing become necessary.
I didn’t know what I was doing. Neither did the fox.
The trap wasn’t all that hard to pull open. I got it off the animal’s foot and let it snap shut again. Then I poured more water on the bad foot and put the mouth of the bottle closer to her mouth and let her drink it all.
After that I backed away and sat against a tree. The fox lay a while longer but finally got up and tested all four of her legs. She didn’t put weight on the bad one but it seemed like she’d probably be okay. She limped away and never looked at me.
I got up and pulled up the spike and chain with the trap. I started whipping it against a tree. I whipped it harder every time, until I imagined the tree was Uncle Danny and the shitty little trap started to break up. It took a minute or two to get my breath back, and then I hung the chain on a tree branch with the broken pieces hanging down.
Pulling the knife out of my belt sheath, I carved a message on the side of the tree for whenever the trapper came to check. Never. Come. Back.
Who knows if it made any difference, but I never found another trapped animal in those woods after that.
Not so long after I turned sixteen I started drawing pictures. It happened because of June, the blonde lady who worked at the library.
It was a small library, but it didn’t seem that way back then. It felt like there were enough books with enough stories and ideas in them to keep a two hundred fifty pound shadow like me occupied forever. That’s how I found out another thing I don’t think they cared if I learned it in school. There was another pair of eyes in my brain that could see a thousand possible worlds other than the one I lived in.
June never bothered me. She even smiled a few times and did a passable job of not staring at my face. I never trusted she meant it because no one else who ever smiled at me meant it either so why should she? But one day when it was quiet she came over to the table where I was reading this book about a guy who murders an old lady and ends up getting caught after he falls in love with a religious whore.
“That’s one of my favorites,” she said.
She made me think of that fox that time in the woods, being a slender animal too easy to break. I was trying to keep from looking at her face.
“Yeah. It’s good.” I looked down and waited for her to go.
“You think he should’ve killed that old lady?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“No?”
I shook it again. I could feel her eyes on the melted half of my face and my neck felt hot.
“You don’t think she had it coming?” the librarian pressed.
“Yeah, maybe. Just wasn’t his choice to make.” I looked at her without thinking about it. The smile was up in her eyes so I decided to trust it. By then I’d read a hundred or so books, but I never talked to anyone about anything I read. It almost seemed like it rearranged the book in my mind. “He’s kind of a weakling, I think. Fuckin’ drama queen, if you ask me.”
I had to pause and apologize for the cuss but June looked more interested in what I thought about that book.
“So you think he’s overreacting to his experience?”
I frowned. “I dunno. I just know he doesn’t have the constitution to be a criminal. He screws up left and right, and the girl…all that religious stuff of hers isn’t gonna help either one of ‘em. People like that…they won’t last another seven years.”
“You don’t think she’ll be there for him?” she asked.
“Would you?”
“Hmmm. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
I spent a lot time looking at June’s face after that. She was the only person I knew who looked back without flinching. I felt her looking at my eyes more than my face. After a while, I decided she was pretty even if her prettiness was mostly hidden behind the awkward way she carried herself. But she talked to me like she never thought there was anything wrong with my brain, and that made her seem prettier in a way I could never explain.
We sat and talked about a lot of the books I went there to read. I started to sit on the other corner of the table so she had to sit on my good side. It seemed like the least I could do. We talked about that book where a guy is sitting in a slaughterhouse basement while airplanes bomb the city where he’s being held prisoner. For a while I was just reading ancient stories. I think those were my favorites. The complications were easier to recognize in my real life, whatever that was.
One day I was reading about the guy who fell in love with himself while this girl who loved him wasted away until there was nothing left of her but her own echo. It wasn’t like it was that great a story, and I certainly didn’t have a lot of room for a guy so pretty he falls in love with himself. As far as I was concerned the story was all about the girl, and she was the reason I started crying.
The next thing I knew June was sitting down beside me. She put her hand on my arm and asked if I was okay. I flinched when she touched me but she didn’t take her hand away.
“It’s nothing. Just a stupid story.”
She sighed. With her hand on my arm it felt like I sighed too. She looked at the book lain open on the table where I’d been reading. We sat like that a while. No one came in. It was just us like it usually was that late in the day.
“I fell in love with a boy like him too. Long time ago. I even wasted away like I was nothing…like the girl in the book.”
“You’re not like her at all.” I couldn’t help looking at her. I didn’t understand how so many people had so many wrong ideas about what they are. Being as much of nothing right and everything wrong as I was, I figured I’d already seen what people were like on the fringes of themselves.
“Maybe not now. Not so much as I used to. But you’re nothing like him, either.”
“That’s not it,” I told her. “I’m her, not him. I’m already wasted away but I never got to fall in love with anybody.”
As soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t.
“Oh William.”
She probably didn’t know that everyone who called me anything either called me Willy or Monster. But she was sitting on the good side and I started to feel better about crying in front of her. I didn’t remember ever crying before. They said I didn’t even cry over the thing with Uncle Danny. I just remember screaming and feeling this rage that went shooting off in every direction.
I felt a different kind of rage sitting there with June’s hand on my arm and her leaning down with her forehead against my shoulder. It was like a soft rage. I think it was the discovery of a loneliness so bone deep even dying wouldn’t wipe it off. I suddenly realized I was okay with it. Loneliness was the companion that kept me standing up inside myself. I started to feel sorry for June. Even though she had a wedding ring, it was easy to see how lonely she was and I think it was something she didn’t know how to do.
“William.”
She whispered it this time and I put my arm around her shoulder. It was even harder to touch than be touched. Something I didn’t know how to do without breaking something.
I knew June didn’t love me. Not like Echo loved Narcissus. But I told her I loved her anyway even though I didn’t. She said my name again and then I made her promise to tell me if anyone ever did anything bad to her so I could break them.
She lifted her head off my shoulder. Her eyes were full of wet and looked like glass. She could see both sides of my face now but she kept trained on my eyes. Her hand moved from my arm to my thigh. Her fingers pressed into the meat inside my leg high up close to my crotch. Everything inside me turned into smoke. It was like someone was touching my life behind my body.
My cock inflated. It happened fast and went hard as a tree in my pants. June felt it, and just when I thought she was going recoil she dropped her hand over the lump. She didn’t look at my face now. She just kept tracing her fingers over the shape of my bulge.
When she pulled on my zipper she looked at me again and leaned closer. I turned so she only had the good side. Her hand fumbled around until it got inside my shorts and curled around my shaft. Seemed like it barely made it all the way around but she started doing this thing where she was squeezing and stroking at the same time and it felt immense.
My own heart became a total stranger. It seemed like there was a whole library of things I should’ve been saying to June but I couldn’t speak. I felt stupid just gasping like I was. She had me overpowered and I never wanted to feel anything else.
The way her hand kept moving over my skin made it feel like it was made out of something else. Something better. Something that wasn’t me, half melted and full of hate and anger. Her lips were on my ear and the rush of her breath came in deafening pulses. My head went back and I heard the scrape of her chair legs on the floor as she shuffled closer. I wanted her to take my cock out and stroke me in the open air but didn’t dare say a word to shatter the moment.
Her chair scraped again, hand moving faster on my shank and her lips were back on my ear again.
“Someone important is going to love you like Echo.”
As if to say, it’s not me but somebody you’re going to love back and I’m just here to keep you walking the same earth you’re going to find her on and until that day keep that heart beating with love under all the layers of rage ….
Then I heard my own chair scraping the floor and my feet shooting out while pure feeling without a shape shot off through my cock and spattered June’s hand and the inside of my pants with mud.
I sat there breathless and couldn’t look at June. She kept her hand in my pants a little longer, just calmly caressing me. Then it withdrew. She got up after a while and walked away without another word. The sound of her steps across the floor was slow and somehow fragile.
A few days later I went back. I was reading a book about these two guys that meet on the street in a big city and become so close they’re like lovers except they never fuck. One of them can’t anyway because he’s too sick. But the story wasn’t about that. I think it was just about the formlessness of love but I’m only guessing about that.
June came over and leaned against the table. “They made a movie out of that one, you know.”
“I can see the movie just fine in my head.”
“Those are the best of all.”
The library was empty, as it was most times, and there was about a half hour before it closed. June left for a minute and when she came back, she took the book out of my hands and led me by the hand around behind the main desk into a room behind. There was a desk and chair, and a table in the middle piled with stacks of books.
“William, could you help me move these books off the table into those boxes?”
It didn’t take long. Books are just as light as paper. And when I got the last of them moved off the table, June sat on top of it and lifted her dress up around her thighs. She started unbuttoning the front of her dress. She pulled it off her shoulders one arm at time and then took off her bra. Her breasts were pale except for a few freckles. Her nipples were a kind of pale brown and hard.
“Come closer, William. Come touch me.”
I looked around, suspicious of I don’t know what.
“It’s okay. I locked the door. We’re closing a little early tonight.”
I got hard already. This wasn’t anything I was used to. I went up close to the table and June had to open her legs wider to fit me in between. She took my hands and put them on her breasts. They felt so warm and soft I was afraid. I didn’t know if they were beautiful breasts, but I knew they were beautiful enough just for being breasts.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.
“I know, William. What would you say if I told you you’re the gentlest person I’ve ever known?”
“I’m not gentle.”
She sighed and her breasts moved against my hands like they were alive.
“You’re gentle now,” she said. “So gentle, even though you could break me in half if you wanted to.”
“But I don’t want to. I’d never do that.”
“I know. That’s what makes you so gentle. Touch me like you want me to touch you.”
My hands moved then. Her breasts had seemed bigger until I touched them. They practically disappeared under my hands except her flesh kept moving with my grip while I felt them, testing them with my fingers. Every time I think I squeezed a little too hard June would gasp and I’d back off.
“I won’t break,” she said. “Your hands feel so nice.”
So I kept massaging her breasts while my cock strained against my pants. June touched me through my clothes, fingers tracing the shape of my cock through them. It felt like she was discovering something she already knew was there. Something new but familiar. I felt weak – like my body was about to turn into glass and shatter all over the floor – but I squeezed her nipples hard so she wouldn’t notice. She gasped and bit her bottom lip. I never saw a woman smile and bite her lip at the same time. I wanted to die and come back as something as beautiful as that.
“Don’t you want to kiss me, William?”
I nodded.
“Kiss me, baby.”
Only my mother ever called me that before and that was only when she was coming out of a fresh nod. You there, baby? Did you hide Mama’s cigarettes again?
I almost recoiled but June reached up and put her hand on the back of my head. She pulled me in and we put our lips together. It was only later on I’d stop to wonder if she’d ever kissed a thing as ugly as me. Her mouth opened so I opened mine, too. Her tongue swirled in along with a hot rush of breath and my heart exploded.
When I kissed June back there was this foreign sensation like we were having a conversation. Like we were still talking about some book that meant nothing more than something better to talk about than the weather.
Everything inside my pants was dripping and hard. And we kissed. We kissed like we were made for it. Born to it. Slaves to the juncture of one mouth to another. I forgot to keep feeling her breasts and wrapped my arms around her. She felt so small and so alive. She made me think about that fox that time and how beautiful things can be so easily crushed.
Whenever I got angry I broke things. My strength always controlled me. But when I was kissing June I was overcome with this strange awareness of every cell. I held her so nothing could ever get in where she was but so she knew she get out.
She reached for one of my wrists. Her hand couldn’t wrap around it all the way but she brought it between us and shoved it under her dress. I touched her through her panties. She felt like summer. The most humid days that wilt everything. She whimpered and gasped in my mouth when I ground my fat fingers over the tender flesh under that sodden fabric. I just grabbed onto the crotch of them and pulled until they ripped away from her body. They landed on the floor somewhere behind me when I shoved my hand back under her dress and fingered those wet folds of silky skin.
I reared up and pulled her dress higher with my other hand. I wanted to look at her pussy and see my fingers pushing at her lips and grinding over her pearl. I wanted to watch my finger slip inside her and distort the shape of her slit.
It struck me how a woman’s pussy is like a scar, too, in a way. But a beautiful scar. As if a flower was like a scar. Everything was wet like flowing honey and velvet. That’s when I realized everything that isn’t female is doomed to be something else, and never something as good.
When my finger went inside her she started squirming on the table. Her hands fluttered in between us to get my pants open. My cock fell into both of her hands. She felt me all over. My granite shank and balls.
“God, William, just fuck me.”
I couldn’t talk and breathe at the same time. I had that dying part down by now, but a long way to go to the coming back as something beautiful part.
My finger slid back from her pussy. My body arched forward, following the way she was pulling my cock toward her hole. It looked small and delicate, even if there was a wild ferocity about it too. The dome of my cock stretched her all out of proportion when she plugged me into the mouth of her pussy. I started pushing in and this sound came out of her throat that sounded like somebody else. I had to look at her face to make sure it was still her.
I watched her eyes the whole time my cock was grinding inside her. It was harder than I thought it would be. She had never been made to be fucked by a monster. I felt bad for her despite this look she had like there was all this poison suddenly leaving her body.
I was holding my hand in the air because my finger was smeared with her syrup and I didn’t want to touch her and get her messy. She grabbed my wrist and brought my hand to her mouth. Then she sucked on my wet finger while my cock went deeper. Her glasses were crooked and her pussy almost felt like another hand.
My ass started to shuffle back and forth, driving my cock in and out of June in long strokes. Everything was just a wet, slippery scraping sensation. Her heels started banging against my ass so I kept going along with the pace it seemed like she wanted.
She spat my finger out of her mouth and started huffing to breathe. Her eyes were on me but she wasn’t afraid. I just kept stroking my cock into her body, and it wasn’t long before the table was scaping along the floor. I kept fucking until the table came up to the wall and stopped. June rocked her hips and fucked back at me. I started touching her breasts again and she fucked back even harder.