Free Boys in Gilded Cages by Jarod Powell Page A

to calling Chester the Molester, our boy’s
uncle, and asks if he has cigarettes.
    Hey, Homes! He waves from his yard.
    ’ Sup, Greer. He stops and
talks and rolls his eyes. Greer seems to enjoy his
attitude.
    He’s back.
    Who’s back?
    Chester the Molester, dummy. Gotta post that
sign in his lawn now, but he’s on probation or something. His kid
moved out. Still don’t have that sign up, though.
    Well, his kid should move out if he was
fucking him, right?
    Fatty got all quiet: But here’s the bad
part. I heard the mom is thinking about getting back together with
him.
    That’s fucked up, kinda.
    You got any cigs, Homes?
    I can find some, Daryl said. Got any
Kool-Aid, Fatty?

    The therapist’s office smells like a bank.
It prevents him from talking too much. It’s like a professional
place, not a place for talking about shit they want you to talk
about. Anymore, they don’t have talks like normal. Doctor Ewen puts
him under hypnosis.
    He plays slow electronic music or water
soundtracks or whatever. He then asks him questions. He remembers
most of it but after the session, a period of time is missing.
Like, he remembers the doctor asking him a question, and the next
thing he remembers is waking him up. He don’t really think that’s
fair. It’s like giving him truth serum, and if he don’t want to
talk about some things, he shouldn’t have to. We’ve all got things
to hide and they should stay hidden until they naturally blow up.
They don’t need help coming out. It hardly seems fair, mainly
because the subconscious is not something we’d even remember to
talk about it. It’s like Marcia and her Wicca. It’s like rushing
the universe. It’s dangerous.
    And lately, Doctor Ewen has been acting
weird. He has a look of pity or mourning or even guilt on his face,
and he touches his shoulder in a deliberately compassionate way on
the way out of his office, and that bothers him, especially after
hypnosis, for obvious reasons.
    People are quiet in the waiting room and
they stare. They couldn’t possibly have heard anything in the
session, but some people let off a stink when they’re sad, like a
radiation or as Marcia says, an “aura”. It’s his best guess. He
don’t like it.
    Riding his bike has become hard work. It’s
June and it’s muggy. He starts sweating outside the door. But
today, he has a destination.
    He chugs through the rock with his flat
tires and once he gets to Marcia’s house he just walks his bike in
the middle of the rows and rows of young trees. Marcia’s outside
sucking on a popsicle. She adjusts her bifocals and perks up when
she sees it’s him.
    What’s up! she hollers in the thick voice of
a chunky girl.
    Hey Marcia, he pants.
    Want a popsicle?
    Okay.
    They sat in the front porch on a white
plastic bench. Marcia talked and talked and talked through her red
stained teeth, while her dad mowed the back lawn and gave him dirty
looks whenever their eyes met. When the Sun was about to go down
and the mosquitoes started biting, Marcia looked at him sheepishly
and said, Let’s go sit in the car and listen to the radio.
    She put it on the pop station. She bobbed
her head along to a dance song. He waited until after the song was
over to change it to the country station. Then she turned it down
and asked him if he had ever been kissed. He said he wasn’t
sure.
    You don’t remember if you’ve ever been
kissed? She detected bullshit.
    I swear, I don’t remember, He said.
    I’ve never been. I’m kind of wanting to get
it over with.
    He kissed her. Then she took his hand and
placed it on her breast.
    The tingling started down in his spine and
he got nervous.
    Your nose is bleeding, she said as she
backed away.
    That’s the last thing he saw before the pain
started, his eyes closed and his head split open again.
    He felt his body being dragged out of the
car and carried like a bride over the threshold, to another car.
Can you hear me? Are you awake? He heard Marcia say over and