Peep

When I was eight-years-old I remember one afternoon in Autumn.  My mother was humming, boiling water with salt over the stove for pasta and chopping white onions for sauce.  From my bedroom floor, surrounded by a skinny little army of Barbie dolls in pink plastic high heels, I felt eyes on me.  My jeans were torn at the knee, grass stains over the thighs and I stared at them for a long time before gathering the nerve to lift my head.

Like cat eyes, glowing green behind a blur of glass and mesh wire screen, a boy watched me through my first-floor window.  Our eyes met.  There were rings of dirt around his, bloodshot veins running through the whites and pupils wide and dark like black holes.  I fell into them.  We stared.  My chest opened, ribcage spread.  He watched my heart beat fast and my tiny pink lungs barely moving.  My organs went to sleep, my eyelids and lashes too.  I couldn’t look away.

He was fifteen and the neighbor’s boy.  I’d seen him once before as I was cutting through his backyard to make it into the deep part of the forest that rain along our street.  There had been a cigarette resting on hip lower lip and it bounced up and down when he smiled at me, dick in his hand, pissing against the chipped paint of his parent’s shed.

He wore the same smile that day, framed by my bedroom window while the sunset somewhere behind him, Jupiter red. 

My mother called out to me that dinner was ready and her voice vibrated the windowpane.  He fled and my gaze stayed in the spot he’d been for a while.  Long enough for my mother to call me twice more and then finally come to grab me by the wrist and pull me toward the kitchen.  My chest was still filled with his stare while I twirled pasta on my fork.  The space he’d taken up didn’t leave room for eating. 

I felt fully afraid, like an open wound, sticky and collecting sand.  He was the first man to ever infect me.  While I lay awake that night, I drew blueprints in my head on the walls I’d build.  Construction began the next day.  Sometimes bricks will crumble, but I keep building.  Building.  Building.