Free Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums

happened and how his sissy son had become part of the game he was playing.
    â€œHe ain’t dead!” I shouted back at my mother in the dugout. “Daddy ain’t dead!” I called, my voice sounding as oddly disappointed as my tomboy neighbor’s had sounded when she had discovered our butt holes bore such similarities.
    ________________
    â€œWhat you thinkin’ ‘bout?” she asked me now as she sat up, pulled a half-smoked cigarette from her cuff, and fired it up with a purloined kitchen match. Smoke filled the old dugout.
    â€œMy daddy,” I said.
    â€œHe still wearing that neck thing?” she asked, mentioning the thick plastic cumbersome white brace he was having to wear until his neck felt better from the baseball collision.
    â€œYeah. He don’t like it, neither,” I told her. “Says he wished he’d ajust a’gone ahead and broke his neck if he was gonna have to wear that thing. Makes him mad all the time.”
    The girl eyed me with a bemusement too advanced for her years. “Take your clothes off,” she finally said.
    I shook my head no.
    â€œGo on. Do like I say,” she said. I continued to hesitate but she moved in closer. “Do it,” she demanded. I reluctantly obeyed and lay down naked before her in the coolness of the dugout’s dirt floor. Slats of light billowed over me from between the weathered shreds of wood on the walls. She took the cigarette butt from her mouth and flicked it away before reaching down and flicking my penis with the same bit of haughty disdain. “That thing grow any bigger?” she asked, narrowing her already narrow eyes. “Make it grow bigger,” she said.
    â€œHow?” I asked.
    â€œThink of something you like. That’s supposed to work,” she suggested.
    â€œCaptain Kangaroo?”
    â€œMr. Greenjeans. Tom Terrific. I don’t give a shit,” she said, loving to shock me with her easy use of scatology. She continued to flick my penis, each flick taking on the rhythmic jingle of Captain Kangeroo’s big set of keys that accompanied his program’s theme song, which she was now singing with a one-word gusto: “Jing-jing-jing-jing. Jing-jing-jing-jing. Jinga-jing. Jinga-jing. Jing-jing-jing.”
    I sat up and crawled over into a corner of the dugout. “Stop it,” I told her. “Stop it.” I balled my knees up toward my chest and held them there.
    â€œDon’t be a baby,” she said with the troubling, grown-up flair she could employ when the situation called for it. “You really are a weirdo. Go outside for minute,” she told me. “I gotta pee.”
    â€œGimme my clothes back,” I whimpered.
    â€œAin’t nobody gonna see you,” she said, grabbing my shorts and shirt and sitting on them. “Them Baptists don’t never come backhere to this old ball field no more. They just use these dugouts to store stuff in like them signs yonder. Softball’s a girl’s game anyways, my mama says. She says it was too underhanded for a bunch of Baptists. Git it? My mama’s always makin’ up jokes. She’s always sayin’ ‘Git it?’ I gotta pee—
scoot,”
she said, charging at me as I headed out into the afternoon sun. I forgot all about my nakedness as I pondered why my one and only friend had to have her privacy to urinate since she had already exposed her butt hole to me. I wondered how high I could get if I started to count. “Okay, you can come back in now,” she beckoned me when I got to around twenty-seven. I reentered the dugout. Its dirt floor had darkened and began to take on a noticeable dankness as the afternoon sun shifted and no longer lit the place with its slivers sliding through the slats. I could just make out the outline of my neighbor’s eight-year-old body lying back in the shadows. She too was naked now. She lay on her back and had positioned the now