The Bangalore Review

They searched for unholy things that lived amongst the trees. They were born from the very trees they’d be strung up on. A sin birthed smelling of a flower. The mob marched, holding lanterns and axes. They were not people of sin.

Between mouthfuls I inspected Nuno.  Short, solid built, thick arms and legs.  He looked to be in his late thirties but was dressed young, in bell bottom jeans and a pink and purple paisley long-sleeved shirt.  He wore his dark brown hair down to his shoulders.  I noticed his eyes darting around, circling the room like a flashlight. 

Everything changed with the arrival of Bo. He walked in high-waisted skinny jeans, his curly hair draping over his shoulder and his back. A thin line of mascara on his eyelashes, a tinge of pink-red on his lips. He was twelve years old, five feet eight inches tall and strutting around the village like a whore of Police Bazaar. You knew immediately that was something you couldn’t stomach. You knew how revolting it is for a boy to walk around like that, staring at men like that, talking to other men like that.

Something was off that morning, that pre-dawn, before I went for a walk and crossed paths with The Man Who Sneezed, but to this day I cannot pinpoint just what was off. Maybe it was the fact that I had cream in my usually black coffee that afternoon, or that my daily conversation with my mother got cut short, or maybe the fact that I was so low that night that I got high so as to forget about the low

You see me bite my lower lip. Hear the grating screech of metal on floor as I pull a chair over to sit at eye-level, the way they taught us to in medical school when ‘Delivering Bad News’. This is not the quick “The CT scan of your head looks great!” conversation you were hoping for.