Draft

Cesar

I.

Your name means “head of hair”—hair for a mother to stroke, for a lover to hold, for me to run my fingers through when I am afraid in the middle of the night.

You were built like stone—smooth, sharp and cold, the bulge and cut of muscle the only thing I had to hold onto with slippery hands. There is no hair on your head or on your arms or on the knuckles of your hands. I tried to keep you close, like a mother holds a child to her chest and my skin cut on your corners.

There were stones in your kidneys. Little by little, your body was becoming unable to filter waste—the oil from burgers, the salt from chips, the malt from beer. Your body was failing to cleanse you of your favorite things.

II.

You were named after your maternal grandfather—a man who you never met while he was living. When you think of him, you imagine dried bones decaying under a slab of marble.

You stopped eating. Your breath began to smell like rot and slowly, your body like a rock sank back into the skinny frame of a boy whose mother used to beat him until his body was spotted with violet kisses. I reached for your hand, wanting the warmth of a lover and my hands turned blue from the cold.

There was blood in your urine. Red bled into the toilet water like a warning: it was just a matter of time.

III.

I said your name in my mind all the ways I could while watching the time tick on a digital clock in another man’s car—12:30, 12:31, 12:32. He was done. I thought the heat would last longer.

We stopped talking. Your silence reminded me of an opaque marble, small but unbreakable. I would throw it onto the floor and the only sound that it would make would be an echo of emptiness—you said nothing. Some nights I wonder if you were still alive. I reach over in the dark and put a hand over a pillow, searching for a heartbeat.

They could not remove the stones, they were too large to be extracted. You are unable to filter waste—the pain from your mother’s beatings, the loneliness buried in your grandfather’s bones, the love I could not cut you with. And it is this that I fear will kill you.

 (written at the office, during lunchbreak)