Every kid has two arms, I have one. Every kid is a boy, now I'm a girl. Every kid has a mom, I had one.

She would lock herself in the bathroom for safety, her crying so urgent, those gasps replaced her breathing. I would sit by the door for hours, trying to talk her down. I only had one line.

There there, your son is here.

Once I asked her to let me in, but she was afraid my father would sneak over and break in. I could see movements through the crack of the door, she a fuzzy mound of darkness, shaking. Please let me in, I said. At the sound of the lock releasing, my father stormed up the stairs in three wide gallops, threw open the door, and split her jaw. She made some faint muted sound and fell to the floor.

I laid in bed, wishing the ceiling lamp would fall on me. The glass would break and cut me into a million pieces. The draft would blow me through the fireplace and into the clouds.

She left my dad many times but always came back for me. By then her red eyes were sores, frozen hives blocking any way inside.

Then one day she left and never came back.

There are no brothers and sisters in this story, just me and him. That's three arms if you're counting.

Holidays were invented by people who enjoy doing things like picnicking and water skiing. For the rest of us, it simply means that everything is closed and you can't go anywhere.

No school plus no work equals my father and I sitting at the kitchen table eating frozen food.

He takes out his dentures, the chewing more like a French kiss. Chews and chews. I imagine his throat muscles clenching, the food going down into his stomach, changing form until finally exiting in one long pungent brown note.

He notices me looking at his mouth, says something stupid I can't remember and I say something back.

Thud thud.

Two punches in face and I'm on the floor.

My father has thick veins that go down his forearm and hand blisters the size of dimes. I look at his veins and want to bleed him to death. One quick slice I could bathe in his blood.

I have this reoccurring dream where I'm cooking his face in a pan as if it were two eggs. His eyes are the yolks, which I poke open. They ooze out and sizzle in the crackling oil.

Blood is leaking from my nose. I can see each drop falling down, getting smaller and smaller until it splats onto the floor.

I get up, hop on my bike and leave.

They say every town is another story, so I rode my bike to another story.

The dry air scrapes my ears. I don't know why I ended up at that particular school, and not my own junior high. Probably because it was further away.

My goal was to get lost. I took every turn I didn't know, sought every foreign horizon. I like being in places where I don't belong—to watch the trees or the sky or the ground—try to figure out exactly what made it different. Maybe the air smelled better, or was warmer.

But no matter how far I went, it was still me looking out of my eyes, still my heartbeat the most boring song of all time.

I wanted to be a different person, a girl.

Emily.

My parents would still be together and would buy me pretty clothes. My socks would be hemmed with lace. Mom would braid my hair while I asked her about boys. My favorite class would be history.

There was nothing to do. I tried to enter the classrooms but they were locked. I drank some water from the fountain which tasted like metal. I crushed coke cans. I threw a fold-out chair at a door.

I sang Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" a cappella.

The sun was hard and the shadows were crisp, just like the video. I found a chewed up pencil and wrote I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride all over the walls as I sang each word. I had to sing it really slow because I couldn't write that fast.

For a kid with one hand and nothing to do, masturbating was not an epiphany.

I went over to the tire swing and crawled underneath the planks. I got on my knees, pulled down my shorts and closed my eyes.

The sand gets darker, making some messy Japanese character. I don't know any Japanese but I know they got dead soldiers too. A bunch of soldiers and a couple of countries with some water in between—that's how to make a war.

There's sand stuck to my knees. I brush the sand off, it sprinkles on the wet spots. I look around to make sure no one saw anything. Just two pigeons, but they don't know the meaning of things.

Now and then I hear the faint noise of a car going by. One of the pigeons flies away, and the other one soon follows. You never see a pigeon way up in the sky because they are just like people, full of land and worry.

It occurs to me that I'm not a cowboy. I find the pencil, go over to the walls and cross out I'm a cowboy each place it is written.

The sky is bruising darker and darker purple and getting colder. A ragged line made by trees and rooftops cuts across the horizon as the sky enters black. I have no idea where I am, or how I'll get home.

I know this sounds stupid but I start to miss him. I hop on my bike and ride back home.

My father is passed out on the couch. One sock is dangling from his foot.

The light from the television taps on his body. It's just the two of us and the news anchor on the TV talking about Memorial Day.

The news footage showed people crying. Their faces were the butts of fruit, all rippled and bunched up from sobbing. Tears have many paths to choose from, just one ground to land on.

Flags got folded into smaller and smaller triangles and people cried. They wore black even though this country is red white and blue.

Nobody's flag is black, except for pirates and Martians, but their stories don't happen in real life.

In real life, a mother disappears and all is left is the shape of her face in the mind of a child who traces the contours like a blind person.

In real life, school is tomorrow and it's a long bike ride there.

My father once told me history is written by the winners, so I guess we're doing okay. Since Emily's favorite class was going to be history, I decided I would start studying harder and not cheat on my tests anymore.

Last year I had to memorize all the states and their capital cities. I drew an upside-down map of America on my chest and wore a large buttoned shirt, keeping some of the buttons undone so I could peek in.

The trouble was guiding the light in through the shirt. I carefully moved around until a ray of light hazed in, an unnoticed sunrise.

I couldn't memorize all the states and their capital cities. They all look the same—a bunch of messed up squares. If our founding fathers didn't argue so much, and there weren't all those mountains or rivers in the way, we could live in perfect tiny boxes, but instead America is one giant jigsaw.

My grandfather was poisoned in the ear at the barber shop. Nobody knows the reason why, but people think it was because of unpaid debts.

Soon he became half-blind and delirious and asked to see his daughter on his death bed.

They brought in another girl to stand in for my mom, because they knew an actual encounter would be too traumatic for her.

They even cut the girl's hair the shape of my mother's. When they brought the girl in, he took her small hands, said "please tell my daughter to be strong", and closed his eyes.

After he died, my mother's relationship with her mother disintegrated into awkward glances at the dinner table and soundless evenings, each one tucked in their own part of the house.

My mother ran away, kept walking until she found a lake to drown herself in.

She was standing on a large rock, pondering the concentric circles made by a frog's occasional surfacing when an old man went approached.

He had been at the lake all afternoon trying to catch some fish, he said. Every single day that summer. Then he saw a beautiful little girl standing on a rock. The girl filled the lake with ache.

He decided to go over and tell her that this world isn't bad, and that whatever is happening to her is smaller than the universe.

You should stay around, he said. So she did. The old man never caught any fish.

The windows are so dark they are half-mirrors with worlds on the other side. I see myself floating in the backyard, the leafless branches poking through my ears.

If you ever look at your face for a long time, it becomes abstracted, like a word you suddenly can't spell

Mom.

You look it up in the dictionary to prove you're right, but it doesn't look that way. You have to let it go, forget about it, until it looks right again.

I touch my father's face, startling him awake. I make a fist above his head. He looks at me with searing clarity.

The glow from the TV makes my fist look like some wild animal on the wall, flickering the way a predator runs in slow motion in the mind of its prey.