Prologue
The little boy needed to pee. Looking for a place to go, he walked to where it seemed like there weren’t so many houses. Further along the road, he saw that there was an entrance to the woods. He walked into the woods until he couldn’t see the road, stopped, unzipped his shorts, and started peeing. As he peed, he thought he heard a scratchy sound. He stopped peeing midstream to listen more attentively. He heard it again. Then he heard a voice. It was a man’s voice. He was shouting. The little boy was scared. He looked around to see where the man was but couldn’t see him. The voice got louder. The little boy wanted to run back to the road but was afraid of being seen. The shouting stopped, and thinking the coast was clear, the little boy started peeing again. After a few seconds, he heard the scratchy sound again, and then the man’s voice, which was now right next to him. He turned around with his pants around his ankles. In front of him was a man, dressed in a clean military uniform, with a hat and boots. He had a large black and brown dog with him on a leash, with big triangular ears, a long tongue that stuck out and looked like a thick piece of wet ham, and two big, black eyes. The man held a walkie-talkie up to his face, and said: “It’s just a kid. Better have a chopper follow him back home, just in case.” The man looked into the little boy’s eyes and sternly told him to get out of the forest. Pee dribbled out of the little boy’s penis. He pulled up his shorts and ran out of the forest.
As he was walking back to his house, he started to hear a sound above his head. He looked up and searched the sky. A helicopter appeared, flying directly over his head, going ’wap-wap-wap-wap-wap.’
He got home and closed the door behind him. His family had just moved into a new house, so there was a big pile of junk mail in the doorway that didn’t belong to anyone. He picked it up, ran past the kitchen where his parents and brother were, ignored something his mother said to him, and took it up to his new room so that he could look through it. Before he did, he went into his parents’ bedroom, closed the door behind him, and looked at the garden. It was big, and had a hill near the bottom that he thought would be good for sliding down if it snowed. At the back of the garden was a fence, and beyond that, the forest. He stared at the trees swaying back and forth in the wind. They reminded him of women with long hair, dancing wildly, in a frenzy.
The boy laid down on his parents’ new bed, the mattress of which was covered in plastic, which squeaked when he laid on it.
He heard someone coming up the stairs. The door opened and his mother appeared.
Mother, he thought.
His mother sat on the bed, put his head in her lap, and played with his hair. As he stared at the ceiling, which he thought of as a rectangular, cloud-filled sky, she started telling him a story.
