{i miss paper letters}

I saw him doing it and I knew what he was doing immediately.  I wanted to feel more, or perhaps otherwise.  I was walking home past the hardware store and his house was the first one on the block, the ugly shade of green bungalow with the chain-link driveway gate on casters that’s rusted into a permanent uselessness.  He was a little boy, six maybe seven years old, and he was hitting the body of a small bird with a stick, a body which had clearly crumpled itself into the defensive position one found it in now in the throes of an ultimate agony at the end.  The stick was almost as long as his spine, and had many sharp barbs where he had carefully snapped off the smaller branches from the base.  I was not close enough to see if the bird had closed its thin eyelid over an eye that must’ve been all pupil or if it was all that remained aloft.  Who knows I said to myself, if he killed it or just found it already dead, and I was answering before I had even finished asking myself the question: Yes, of course he killed it, he’s a sadistic little fucker and he’s probably tortured and subsequently murdered numerous small, helpless animals because, after all, the way he was talking to that little corpse was something else, something old, something practiced, rehearsed in front of a mirror before bed and early in the morning, something spread on dry toast each morning for breakfast and on “minute” rice for dinner.  There was something owed to him by who knows else and thus collected from the only beings he could master, the only ones smaller than he felt.  The elastic cuffs of his dirty gray sweatpants had been cut off and he wore no socks, black plastic huaraches.  Huaraches are both a type of sandal and a food made of masa and various delicious toppings; only the sandals are widely available in the United States.  Like the bird he was small; also like the bird, he was young, but felt very old.  How might I know this, you ask? These are the words he called after me once I had almost passed entirely out of his view.