Sprout

fish-white skin like an oil slick dispersing in the ocean. “Does this hurt?” I said, and jabbed a finger right in the center of the dark pool.
    “Mother—” The rest of the word disappeared in a cough, and I turned to run, but he tripped me before I could get away, then fell on me in a rain of punches so hard I wasn’t sure if we were wrestling or if he was really trying to kill me. But even as we began to roll downhill, strangling, elbowing, scissor-kicking and otherwise aiming ninja death blows and Ultimate Fighting—style submissions against each other, I knew it was a game—a life or death game, maybe, but that was how Ty did things. That was how he played, and I was discovering I liked playing that way too. Or at least I liked playing that way with him. Every jab, every parry was a bone-hard reminder that I finally had someone else to measure myself against, to find out what was me and what was beyond me. By which I mean: I got him in a rear-naked choke and squeezed as hard as I could. Ty didn’t bother to try and pull free, just went straight for my groin with the big fat heel of one of his shoes, which, when my boys exploded in what felt like about a gallon of blood, suddenly seemed less ridiculous than a masterpiece of offensive engineering. Spots danced in front of my eyes, and when I could see again Ty was behind me, his arms looped under mine and his hands pressing my head forwards in a full nelson. My shoulders screamed as Ty attempted to rip my arms from their sockets, and plus too our heads were knocking together because—remember?—we were still tumbling down the slope, which was baked hard as concrete yet powdery at the same time, battering us and coating us in dust, breaking bones and choking the last breaths from our bodies and Ty doing his dead-level best to snap my arms out of their sockets, until suddenly something green and spikey caught my eye.
    “Cactus!”
    By some joint navigational effort we managed to veer off to the right just in time to avoid the needled paddles of a nest of prickly pears, but:
    “Crap!” Ty said, which might’ve been a pun, since what he was exclaiming at was a big pile of ostrich turds, nestled together like a basket of plums, or dinner rolls maybe, or cupcakes (though why they only reminded me of food is anyone’s guess). We stopped then, since otherwise we’d’ve had to roll uphill, and we were too exhausted. Ty loosed his nelson and fell off me, and we lay side by side on our backs, panting, coughing, spitting, staring up at the blue-brown sky, occasionally turning our heads to the side to spit. At one point Ty turned his head my way, and I slitted my eyes against a glob of brown spittle, but all that came out of his mouth was:
    “You think this is what Adam looked like? When God first made him out of dust?”
    I turned and looked at Ty head-on. A brown patina covered his skin from top to toe, and you could almost believe his blinking eyes were opening for the first time, taking in the vastness of the physical world and the even vaster sky that hung above, empty and endless and blank.
    “You believe all that stuff?”
    “I want to believe. I wanna believe that there’s a heaven and my dad’s gonna go to it, and that there’s a hell I can go to too, so I don’t never have to see his ugly face again.”
    I looked over to see if his lip had started bleeding. The bruise was covered in dust, but I could still see the shadow of it. Fist-sized. Right there on his cheek. He saw me looking. Looked away.
    “You miss her?” His voice was hard, defensive, like someone holding up a tennis racket to protect his face rather than actually trying to return the ball.
    “Who?”
    “ Duh . Your mom, doofus.”
    “Oh. Her. Yeah, sometimes.”
    “Sometimes I wish my mom was dead. Then I could stop wondering if she’s ever gonna come back.”
    “And rescue you?”
    Ty coughed, then cursed. “That’s what I’d say to her,” he said, “if she came back.” He spat out the wad of phlegm that had come up with the hard k at the end of the particular curse he’d picked out. “That’s what I’d do to her.”
    “I, um.” I didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, and then I threw in, “Maybe she had her reasons?”
    Ty’s lip curled away from his teeth, half sneer, half snarl. It was scary how quickly he could go from being mad at someone who wasn’t around to being mad at the person who just happened to be in front of