BRIAN

When Brian was fourteen, he came home from school with a black eye. This wasn’t the first time. The other kids would call him shorty, small fry, half stack, oompa-loompa, and he would try to shrug it off, try not to let their words bother him, but they would always keep at it and after a time he wouldn’t be able to hold back.

This was soon after his mother lit out for Eugene, and lately his father had been trying too hard to be a father. Clapping his son on the back. Calling him buddy. Talking loudly about trucks and fishing and basketball. When he saw the black eye, he grabbed his son by the chin and eyed him closely and asked what happened. Brian shrugged and said, “Some shit.” They went out then and bought some boxing gloves, black ones, so that his father might teach Brian the old one-two combo followed by a roundhouse.

In their backyard he told Brian, “Stand like you stand when shooting a gun.” He placed one foot in front of the other. “It’s the same principle.” He lifted his right glove before his mouth and positioned his left next to his cheek. “Now put up your dukes. Now bend your knees and bounce on your toes. Good. Now hit me.” Brian took a step forward and hesitated. “Hit me,” his father said. “Hit me, you puss.”

This was the first time his father had ever called him a name. Brian felt a stab upon hearing it and jabbed his father in the belly. “Harder. Like you mean it.” Brian swung with everything he had. His father stepped aside with his leg angled out to trip. The force of Brian’s swing carried him over it and he lay sprawled out in the dirt. “Get up.” Brian did as he was told, a bit hot and watery around the eyes. “You punch like a girl. Punch like you got balls.” His tone was almost furious.

Brian forgot about his stance, his gloves, and lunged, swinging like a street fighter. His father’s body, so huge compared to his, eluded Brian with a few quick steps. His father faked a shot to his chest and Brian flinched and cowered, pitched forward by the pain he anticipated.

“Come on,” his father said. “I haven’t even hit you and you’re acting like I hit you. You’re practically bawling.” Brian tried to calm himself, to breathe. He assumed the classic boxer pose and sprang forward and his father short-punched him in the mouth. Brian didn’t know if it was the pain or the shock or the humiliation, but he went down—with a clash of his teeth—and stayed down, crying.

He remembers a deep purplish blood rushing all over his gloves when he put them to his mouth, as if his father’s fist had tapped the deepest blood in his body. “Oh, no,” his father said. “No, no, no.” Pulling off his gloves, pulling Brian into a hug. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Both of them crying.

Later, his front tooth turned gray, eventually fell out, and Brian woke up with twenty dollars under his pillow. His smile had a hole in it for over a year before the orthodontist implanted a false tooth whiter and squarer than the rest. During this time he learned not to smile. He learned how to talk by barely moving his lips.

Sometimes he thinks about the hole—how vulnerable it made him feel, how his tongue constantly probed it—when he hunches before locks to prick them with his tools. Every house is a mouth. Her house is a mouth.