On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“Memory is a choice. You said that once to me,” Little Dog says to Rose, “with your back to me, the way a god would say it.” If Rose would turn around, Little Dog says, she would see her son lying under a tree with a boy, both their faces smeared with blood. The taller boy, not Rose’s son, is bleeding, and they are clapping and singing. It is November, and the wind is turning colder. The cut over the tall boy’s eye opens again and bleeds, and Rose’s son tries to forget. If Rose were god, she would tell them not to clap. “You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on,” Little Dog writes to Rose. “But you are not a god.” 

Rose will never meet the boy under the tree with Little Dog. Sometimes at night, Little Dog says, it feels as if a bullet is stuck deep inside him. It seems like the bullet has always been there, like it was the bullet, not Little Dog, which Rose carried in her womb. Little Dog asks the boy, Trevor, to tell him a secret—any secret, as long as it is “normal.” Trevor agrees and begins talking. “Ma,” Little Dog says. “You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were a god, you’d know it’s a flood.”

As Rose’s son, Little Dog knows about both work and loss. Rose’s hands are “hideous,” dry and wrecked after years of working as a manicurist. The nail salon is more than just a place of beauty; it is a place where children are raised, like Little Dog’s cousin, who grew up with asthma from the chemicals and fumes. The nail salon is also a kitchen, where the smell of cooking noodles lingers with bleach and industrial cleaner. Manicurists spend hours at their desks, and when they don’t have clients, they pour over English workbooks from ESL classes that take 25% of their wages. Little Dog both hates and loves Rose’s mangled hands “for what they can never be.”

It is a Sunday, and Little Dog is 10 years old. It is Rose’s job to open the nail salon on the weekends, and, as usual, Little Dog goes with her. He flips the sign to “Open,” and a client, an older woman about 70 years old, limps into the salon. She asks for a pedicure, and Rose motions her to the pedicure chair and begins to fill the jetted tub with warm water and different solutions. When the tub is filled, Rose motions for the woman to put her feet in, but the woman hesitates. Then, the woman reaches down and, rolling up her pant leg, removes her leg from below the knee. It is a prosthesis, Little Dog realizes, as she places her other leg and foot into the water.

Just as Rose finishes massaging the client’s calf, the woman motions to the other side, to her missing leg. “Would you mind,” she says. “I can still feel it down there. It’s silly, but I can.” Rose says nothing and begins massaging the woman’s missing leg. Little Dog watches as the “muscle memory” of Rose’s arms work the woman’s imaginary leg, her movements outlining what isn’t there. Rose dries the woman’s foot, and when she goes to leave, she hands Rose a hundred dollar bill. “The lord keep you,” the woman says. Rose takes the money and puts it in her bra.

Later that night, Rose lays on the living room floor, and Little Dog massages her back. He takes a quarter, dips it in Vicks VapoRub, and pulls it firmly down Rose’s sore muscles. Little Dog thinks of Barthes again. “A writer is someone who play with the body of his mother,” Barthes says, “in order to glorify it, to embellish it.” Little Dog looks to Rose’s spine and thinks it resembles “a row of ellipses no silence translates.” He wishes Barthes was right, but to Little Dog, writing about Rose is to “mar” her. “I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once,” Little Dog says.

The summer Little Dog is 14, he gets his first job working at a tobacco farm outside of Hartford. He knows that Rose won’t let him ride his bike all the way there, so he lies and tells her that he is working at the church gardens in town. The pay is nine dollars an hour, and since he is too young to legally work, he is paid in cash. It is 2003. Bush has declared war on Iraq, and the Black Eyed Peas are on the radio. Tiger Woods has just become the PGA Player of the Year for the fifth year in a row, and Steve Jobs is still alive. Rose’s nightmares are getting worse, and Little Dog often finds her sitting naked at the kitchen table in the middle of the night talking about “a secret bunker.”

Little Dog gets up at 6:00 a.m. six days a week and rides his bike to the tobacco farm. Most of the workers there are illegal immigrants from Mexico, and nearly everyone speaks Spanish. The men sleep in camping trailers hidden from the road, just beyond the tree line, and when the work is over, they move to the next farm. The barn is empty now, but by September, it will be full of tobacco. Mr. Buford pulls up in his green Bronco and gives the workers a ride to the fields. When Little Dog jumps out of the Bronco, he sees a group of men working about 100 yards ahead. They are the “cut team,” and it is their job to cut the tobacco down. Little Dog is part of the “spear crew,” and he must pick up what the first crew cuts down.

The first day on the job, Little Dog turns down a pair of gloves when they are offered to him, and his hands turn brown and sticky with sap and are full of splinters and cuts. The work is hard and tedious, but Little Dog enjoys it, and the men are pleasant. Little Dog doesn’t speak Spanish, and they don’t speak English, but Little Dog learns to speak to the other farm workers “with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, [and] hesitations.”

“Sorry,” Little Dog says, is the most common English word said at the nail salon. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” the manicurists say. “I’m so, so sorry.” They say “sorry” even when they haven’t done anything wrong. The word is a “tool,” Little Dog says, and if repeated enough, it “becomes currency.” To say “sorry” in the nail salon isn’t to apologize; it is to remind clients that they are “right, superior, and charitable.” In the nail salon, “sorry” is a completely different word, just as “Lo siento” (I’m sorry in Spanish) is in the tobacco field. 

At the Connecticut tobacco farm, “Lo siento” is the most commonly spoken Spanish word. The workers say “Lo siento” to Buford when they run into him in the field, and they say it to each other at the start of the day instead of “Good morning.” When Little Dog is forced to miss work because Lan has a schizophrenic attack and tries to burn her clothes in the oven, Little Dog calls Mr. Buford and says “Lo siento.” Little Dog thinks of the men he works with. One has almost saved enough money to buy his mother a house in Guadalajara, and one is trying to send his daughter to dental school in Mexico City. Another is paying for his sick mother’s surgery. For these men, “Lo siento” keeps them working. 

At the end of the work day, as Little Dog watches the farmhands return to their trailers, he wants to say, “Lo siento.” Little Dog is sorry they never see their families, and he is sorry that some of them will never make it back to Mexico or South America. Little Dog wants to say “I’m sorry,” but instead he says nothing. For Little Dog, the word “sorry” has become “something else.” This is why, when Trevor first introduces himself in the tobacco field, Little Dog says, “Sorry.”

The day after meeting Trevor for the first time, Little Dog runs into him in the barn. It is a cool day, and the air smells of cut tobacco. Little Dog stands by his bike, and Trevor drinks a sports drink. Trevor is “boyish” looking, but there is something pained in his expression, and his lips are sealed around the bottle in a “flushed, feminine pout.” The day before, Trevor had watched Little Dog work in the field. Usually, no one ever notices Little Dog. “I who was taught, by you, [Rose],” Little Dog says, “to be invisible in order to be safe.” In grade school, Little Dog was once sent to time-out for 15 minutes, where he sat forgotten for two hours.

Little Dog and Trevor spend hours talking in the barn, until the late summer sun begins to set. Trevor tells Little Dog that the tobacco they are harvesting is headed to Africa and East Asia, where people still smoke. Trevor claims the crops are poor and have few seasons left before they stop growing all together. Trevor is silent, and after a moment, he tells Little Dog that he hates his father. Little Dog is quiet and then says he hates his father, too.

“The boy,” Little Dog says, is six years old and is wearing Superman underwear. “You know this story,” Little Dog says to Rose. The boy is crying, but his cries are beginning to die down. His mother has locked him in the basement for wetting the bed again, even though he begged her not to. Now, he stands in the basement, a Superman near his crotch stained brown and urine wet between his toes. The boy closes his eyes and stops crying.

Sitting on top of a tool shed with Trevor, Little Dog feels the cool breeze and watches the late summer sun go down. They are done working for the day, but Little Dog is too tired to start the bike ride home. They sit talking, and Trevor talks about guns and dropping out of school. He thinks the Colt factory might be hiring again, since it has been months since the last mass shooting. Trevor talks about his father and his drinking, about video games, and cartoons, and Little Dog talks about Rose and her nightmares.

“Cleopatra,” Trevor says after a moment of silence. Little Dog is confused. Cleopatra, Trevor says, watched the same sunset. Everyone who has ever lived, has lived under the same sun, Trevor explains, so Cleopatra watched the same sunset. Trevor says he sometimes wishes he could just run away forever, and Little Dog says it must suck to be the sun. The sun can’t see itself, Little Dog explains, and it doesn’t know if it is round or square, ugly or beautiful. “Like you can only see what you do to the earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are,” Little Dog says. Trevor says he thinks it would suck to be the sun because it is on fire, and he is going to put it out, Trevor says, exposing his penis and urinating off the shed.

The boy’s mother comes home after working late at the clock factory. Usually, the boy picks up his toys before his mother gets home; however, today he has lost track of times playing with his toy soldiers, and the little men are scattered all over the floor. When she opens the door, he knows what is coming, and upon seeing the toys, she backhands him several times. The boy’s grandmother runs in and shields him from his mother’s blows. She eventually stops and walks away.

After the day on the roof of the shed, Little Dog and Trevor drive around in Trevor’s truck. As he drives, Trevor cuts a cigarillo lengthwise with a box cutter and empties out the tobacco and tells Little Dog to hand him two plastic bags from the glovebox. Little Dog reaches in and grabs the bags—one filled with marijuana, the other with cocaine—and hands them to Trevor, who fills the cigarillo with marijuana and sprinkles it with cocaine. He licks the cigarillo to seal it and lights it. They pass the cigarillo back and forth until Little Dog feels his head disconnect and float away. They talk for hours in the truck but somehow end up in the barn again.

“Don’t be weird,” Trevor says to Little Dog. Trevor picks up a WWII army helmet and puts it on. Little Dog is struck by the “impossibly American” image of Trevor in the army helmet and thinks that he couldn’t have invented a more perfect symbol. Little Dog stares at Trevor and studies him, intensely and obviously. “Don’t be weird,” Trevor says again, snapping Little Dog out of his near-trance. Little Dog promises he wasn’t staring, and Trevor checks to see if the radio is working. The sound of Patriots football fills the barn.

Little Dog knows very little about football, but Trevor tries to explain the rules. As the Patriots score the winning touchdown and Trevor celebrates, Little Dog moves closer to him, quietly saying Trevor’s name. Little Dog tastes the salt and sweat on Trevor’s cheek, and Trevor softly moans (or maybe Little Dog imagines this), so he continues, licking the length of Trevor’s body. Little Dog can hear a heavy thud as the army helmet falls from Trevor’s head, and in the background, the crowd goes wild at the Patriots game.

In a bathroom with green walls, the boy’s grandmother gently rolls a warm boiled egg over the boy’s welted cheek. The boy’s mother has just struck him in the face with a ceramic teapot, and the grandmother swears the egg will heal all his bruises. The boy quietly thanks the grandmother, and she promises he will be fine. She then removes the egg from his face and tells him to eat it. His bruises, she says, are inside the egg now. If he eats the egg, the bruises won’t hurt anymore. 

Little Dog works on the tobacco farm for two more seasons, but he continues to see Trevor all year long. One October day—October 16, a Thursday, to be exact—Little Dog discovers for the first time that he is beautiful. He remembers the day perfectly (“how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful?” Little Dog asks), and even Rose is smiling and happy. After taking a shower, instead of drying off and dressing immediately, Little Dog stands naked in front of a full-length mirror and waits for the steam to clear. Staring at his body, Little Dog is struck with the beauty of his body, and he is unable to pull his eyes away.

Trevor lives with his father in a trailer behind the interstate. In his room, Trevor turns up the stereo. A song by 50 Cent blares from the speakers, and Trevor asks Little Dog if he has heard the new song before. Little Dog has, but he lies and says he hasn’t, giving Trevor a little power and knowledge over him. Trevor walks back and forth, singing along with the lyrics, and Little Dog looks around the room. Movie posters hang from the walls, and the desk is littered with receipts and various garbage, as well as scattered marijuana and fentanyl patches. In Trevor’s bed together, Little Dog can again taste the salt and sweat of Trevor’s body. Trevor, shaking, tells Little Dog to close his eyes—he doesn’t want Little Dog to see him. Little Dog closes his eyes, but he remembers that Trevor is white and he is not. 

It is impossible to tell the story of Trevor, Little Dog tells Rose, without talking about drugs. Little Dog can’t tell the story without the “Oxy and coke,” and he can’t tell the story without talking about the rusted red Chevy truck that Trevor’s grandfather, Buford, gave to his father. Little Dog remembers Trevor speeding along in the Chevy, a fentanyl patch on his arm. They have been smoking pot and snorting coke, and they laugh as Trevor loses control of the truck and smashes it into a large, dead oak.

The first time Trevor and Little Dog have sex, they don’t really have sex at all. Little Dog tells Rose that he only has the courage to tell her all this because he knows she will probably never read the letter. He remembers a painting of a bowl of peaches hanging on the wall in Trevor’s trailer. It is a cheap picture, something mass-produced and sold at the dollar store, but Little Dog is drawn to it. The painting isn’t really a painting at all, but a computer print made to look like a painting. It is “a fake. A fraud.” Which is why Little Dog loves it. Under the covers, Trevor slips his penis between Little Dog’s legs, and Little Dog spits in his palm, taking Trevor in his hand. They do not talk, and afterward, Trevor lays with his back to Little Dog, crying “skillfully in the dark.”

The boy’s first memory of his parents is in their Hartford kitchen. The blood runs from his mother’s nose as red as Sesame Street’s Elmo, and his grandmother runs into the room, scooping him up into her arms. The grandmother runs out the door, screaming in Vietnamese. “He’s killing my girl! God, god! He’s killing her.” The neighbors run out and pull his father from his mother, and soon the ambulance and police arrive. The police officers run in with their guns drawn, and the father, used to living in Vietnam, waves a bloody $20 bill. The officers tackle him, the money falling to the floor, and force him into the back of the police car. When no one is looking, a neighbor girl picks up the bloody money and leaves.

In his backyard, Trevor shoots at old paint cans with a .32 Winchester. “[T]o be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun,” Little Dog interrupts, “is to move from one end of a cage to another.” Little Dog thinks about a hunting story Buford told him at the farm. In Montana, Buford came across a bull moose caught in a trap. The buck saw Buford and charged at him, ripping his leg off in the trap. It ran at him with three legs, cutting into the bush at the last minute. Buford was lucky, he said. Moose are dangerous, even with three legs. Now, Trevor and Little Dog sit, passing a joint laced with Oxy, on the bench in the backyard. The back of the bench has been blown off from years of shooting and appears much like four legs without a body.

About a week after Little Dog and Trevor’s first sexual experience, they do it again. This time, Trevor grabs a fistful of Little Dog’s hair and yanks his head back forcefully. Little Dog is instantly excited by the violent action, and he tells Trevor to keep going. Little Dog never thought pain and violence would be part of sex. He wonders what an animal that gives itself up to the hunter is called: “A martyr? A weakling?” No, Little Dog decides, it is simply an animal who has found “agency to stop.” It is like a period at the end of a sentence; it allows one to stop with the intention of continuing. Little Dog has learned, he tells Rose in his letter, that submission can be powerful, too. “Fuck. Me. Up,” he says to Trevor. By now, violence is really all Little Dog knows of love.

Trevor and Little Dog begin to refer to their modified sex as “fake fucking,” and one day, Trevor asks Little Dog to be on top, like Trevor always is. They snuggle into the bed, and just as Little Dog slips his penis between Trevor’s legs, Trevor stops him. “I can’t. I just—I mean…” Trevor stammers. “I dunno. I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t man. I’m sorry, it’s not for me—,” Trevor stops. “It’s for you,” he says to Little Dog. “Right?” Little Dog pulls the covers up, and Trevor goes back to playing his video game. Little Dog watches the television screen as a little red Mario falls from a platform. “This was also called dying,” Little Dog writes.

As a child, Little Dog once ran away from home, he says. He didn’t know what to do or where to go, so he packed a bag of Cheerios, an extra pair of socks, and two Goosebumps paperbacks and went to the park by the school. There, he climbed a huge maple tree and sat. Suddenly, he heard footsteps on the leaves below, and then he heard Lan’s voice. “Little Dog,” Lan said into the darkness. “Your mom, [Rose]. She not normal okay? She pain. She hurt. But she want you, she need us. […] She love you, Little Dog, But she sick. Sick like me. In the brains.”

Little Dog asks Rose if she thinks happiness and sadness can combine to create one feeling. Like “a deep purple feeling,” Little Dog explains, “not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?” It is 7:00 in the evening on Thanksgiving Day, and Little Dog and Trevor are riding their bikes down Main Street. Trevor’s father is back at their trailer eating TV dinners and drinking whiskey. The boys decide they are hungry, so they go to a gas station, where they buy two frozen egg-and-cheese sandwiches. They sit across the street, eating their sandwiches, and listen as a man calls some neighborhood kids in for the night. The day is “a purple day,” Little Dog says. It isn’t good, and it isn’t bad, just something in between.

There aren’t many second chances in life, Little Dog says. He opens his eyes and can hear Chopin, the only music Rose listens to, coming from somewhere in the house. Little Dog gets up and goes to the living room, but the record player is silent. He goes to the kitchen and finds Rose’s small radio—the one she bought from Goodwill and slips in the pocket of her apron—in a puddle of spilled milk. He grabs the radio and goes outside, where he knows she will be. In the backyard, Rose is standing at the chain-link fence, her back to the house. Little Dog approaches her and stands beside her. “I hate you,” he says. “You hear me? You’re a monster.” She returns to the house, and Little Dog chases behind her, crying. “Ma!” he yells. “I didn’t mean it.”

It is a dreary Sunday when Little Dog tells Rose the truth. Despite the overcast day, it is bright inside the Dunkin’ Donuts, where Little Dog and Rose sit drinking coffee. “I don’t like girls,” Little Dog blurts out, purposefully avoiding the Vietnamese word for gay—pê-đê, which comes from the French for pédéraste. Before the French occupied Vietnam, there was no word for queer people, who were seen as normal people like everyone else. Little Dog tells his mother that he will leave, if that is what she wants, and she asks if he plans on wearing dresses now. Queer people are killed for wearing dresses, she reminds him. She tells Little Dog that he doesn’t have to leave, and then she asks him when all of this started. “I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy,” Rose says. “I know that.”

When Little Dog was in the first grade, he sat down to eat his mushy school lunch in the cafeteria next to Gramoz, an Albanian boy whose family came to America after the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead of the slop served in the cafeteria, Gramoz was eating pizza bagels, and he offered one to Little Dog. Little Dog never spoke to him (Little Dog could barely speak English), but he began following Gramoz around after that day. To be near Gramoz was to be near to his small act of kindness, but that ended one day on the playground. “Stop following me, you freak!” Gramoz yelled. “What the heck is wrong with you?”

Back at Dunkin’ Donuts, Rose tells Little Dog that she has something to tell him, too. Little Dog had an older brother, she says, but he is dead. The boy had a name, Rose says, but she refuses to speak it, and she felt him growing and moving inside her. But there was nothing to eat, she says, and they were starving. Little Dog wasn’t born until they knew they would live, Rose says.

After Little Dog’s experience with Gramoz and the pizza bagel, Rose bought Little Dog a hot-pink Schwinn. As Little Dog rode the bike around the parking lot of their tenement house, he was stopped by a boy, who knocked Little Dog off the bike. The boy took a keychain and scraped the pink paint from the bike in long colorful sparks. Little Dog wanted to tell him to stop, but he didn’t have the words, so he just sat there. Later that night, Little Dog watched as Rose painted the bike pink again with skillful strokes of nail polish. That was the day, Little Dog says, that he learned how dangerous color can be.

In the donut shop, Rose tells Little Dog about the pills she was given at the hospital. After a month of the pills, she was supposed to expel the baby on her own, but she could still feel him move and felt immense pain. She went back to the hospital, where nurses injected her with Novocain and “scraped [her] baby out of [her], like seeds from a papaya.” She caught a quick look of the baby, she says, before they threw him in the garbage. Rose is quiet for a minute, and then she tells Little Dog that she first heard Chopin in Vietnam. She was just six or seven years old, and she could hear the man across the street—a pianist trained in Paris—playing his Steinway. 

A few months before the day in Dunkin’ Donuts, Little Dog interrupts, a 14-year-old Vietnamese boy in a rural village had acid thrown in his face for putting a love letter in another boy’s school locker. Just last summer, Little Dog adds, Omar Mateen, a 28-year-old Florida man, walked into an Orlando gay club and opened fire with an automatic rifle, killing 49 people.

The average placenta weighs about one and a half pounds, Little Dog says, and passes nutrients, waste, and hormones back and forth between mother and fetus. It is like a language—the first language spoken by anyone. Rose interrupts Little Dog’s thoughts. Her baby came to her in dream once, she says. He wanted to see what his mother looked like. “I was a girl,” she says. “Oh god…Oh god, I was seventeen.”

When Little Dog was in college, a professor said during a lecture on Shakespeare’s Othello that gay men are naturally narcissistic, and narcissism is often a sign of homosexuality in those who have not yet admitted their sexuality. This idea angered Little Dog, but the thought stayed with him. He wonders now if he followed Gramoz all those years ago because he was looking for a reflection of himself. Historically speaking, Little Dog says, beauty has “demanded replication.” Poems, paintings, and sculptures are reproduced because they are beautiful. It wasn’t pizza Little Dog wanted from Gramoz, he decides, “but replication.”

There is a reason that a comma looks like a fetus, Little Dog says. The comma is a “curve of continuation.” Suddenly, Rose says she is going to be sick, and Little Dog helps her to the public bathrooms inside the Dunkin’ Donuts. She bends over the toilet, and Little Dog places his hand on her back. He looks up, and, seeing to the urinals, he realizes they are in the men’s room. Rose throws up again, and they leave the restaurant. Little Dog doesn’t tell that her has worn a dress, and he will again in the future.

Trevor’s living room is “miserable with laughter,” as his father sits drunk in the recliner in front of the television. Trevor and Little Dog sit behind him on the couch, giggling and texting a friend. In the darkness, Little Dog can see the scar on Trevor’s neck from when his father shot him with a nail gun. “Go ahead,” Trevor’s father says, “laugh.” Trevor tells his father that they aren’t laughing at him, but it is already too late. “I hear you,” his father says. “I see things.” He asks if “that China boy” is with Trevor. “He don’t talk but I hear him,” the drunk man says. He asks Trevor if he remembers his uncle, and Trevor says he does. “He whooped them in that jungle,” Trevor’s father says. “He did good for us.”

Riding their bikes along the Connecticut River, Trevor and Little Dog can see the city on both sides. Little Dog looks to his side of the river, the side Trevor knows nothing about having lived his entire life on the “white side.” Little Dog can see Asylum Avenue, where there used to be an actual asylum but is now home to an Indian family from New Delhi. In India, the mother was a school teacher, but in America, she sells hunting knives door-to-door. There is also a Mexican family, but the father is in jail on gun and drug charges. And there is Marin, who walks to work every day in high heels, her Adam’s apple just visible. The men in the neighborhood call her a “faggot” and a “homomaphedite,” and they threaten to kill her.

Little Dog can see the tenement building where he used to live and ride his pink Schwinn, and he can see the parking lot of the church, where a friend’s sister overdosed on drugs. There is also the parking lot of the auto repair shop, where a screaming infant was pulled from the trunk of a car during a blizzard. Little Dog and Trevor ride away from the river, towards Main Street, leaving the people on the other side of the river behind. They ride up a hill, from which they can see the sprawling houses of the wealthy beyond them. Trevor points and says a famous basketball player lives up there. If that guy was his dad, Trevor says, Little Dog could always come and stay at their house.

Little Dog reminds Trevor that he already has a father, but Trevor tells Little Dog to ignore his father and not let him upset Little Dog. It is the alcohol that gets to him, Trevor says. Little Dog claims he isn’t upset about Trevor’s father and grows quiet and distant. “Hey, don’t do the fuckin’ silent thing, man,” Trevor says. “It’s a fag move.” They sit for a few more minutes, get back on their bikes, and head for home. 

The structure of Little Dog’s letter changes, and his writing turns to poetry. He writes of Trevor, driving a rusty pickup truck without a license. Trevor, his blue jeans covered in blood, waving from his driveway as Little Dog rides by on his old Schwinn. Trevor, who messes around with girls and then humiliates them. Trevor driving 50 miles per hour in his father’s field, the comma shaped scar on his neck “syntax of what next what next what next.” 

Little Dog writes of Trevor loading a shotgun, of Trevor in the rain, and of Trevor begging him. “Please tell me I am not,” Trevor pleads. “Please tell me I am not,” he stammers, “I am not / a faggot. Am I? Am I?  Are you?” Trevor the “hunter,” the “redneck,” not Trevor the “pansy,” “fruit or fairy.” Trevor is not veal, not since his father told him what veal is. “The veal are the children,” Trevor’s father said. 

Veal are calves put into a box, Little Dog explains, where they are kept alive. They aren’t permitted to move or put weight on their muscles, so they stay tender and better tasting. “We love eatin’ what’s soft,” Trevor’s father once said, staring Trevor “dead” in the eyes. “[E]very box will be opened in time,” Little Dog says, “in language.” There is blood in Little Dog’s mouth, and the rusty truck is totaled under a tree. Trevor texting after two months of silence. Trevor, Little Dog’s “all-American beef but no veal.” Little Dog claims memory is “a second chance,” and a calf sits in a “box tighter than a womb,” waiting. Little Dog puts his head to Trevor’s chest and listens “like an animal / learning how to speak.”