Baby Teeth

The first cut, as they say, is the deepest

I couldn’t sleep last night. Every drunk yelling under the window finally slipped away by 3AM and left the street silent.

My beloved was deep in slumber, a fort of pillows protecting his right flank. I curled up on my lover’s other side and woke him up.

1959, Oakland

“Jon, tell me a story,” I said, “you know, a really personal story.”

It’s a little joke. If he speaks to me in confession, I will fall into a dead slumber. The more secret the story, the sooner I’ll drift off.

I thought of a question to get him started. “When you were a little boy, what was the first time you can remember getting hurt?”

Jon remembered a spill. He took a fall in the public commons of a housing project in State College, Pennsylvania. He was running— tripped and scraped his knee on the edge of a slate staircase. He remembered the blood pouring out of his knee, the shock of all that red ink. His mother came running out, bundled him up, wiped his tears. I always wanted to be bundled like that.

I fell asleep dreamin…