Free Black Dance by Nancy Huston

literally anything—blows, rape, verbal attacks—and keep a hot star burning in your brain . . .)
    Other times, in the closet, little Milo hears his mother’s voice singing to him and whispering his secret name, or the voice of Sara Manders reading him a bedtime story. He feels Sara’s ample bosoms against his back as she holds him on her lap and cuddles him, strokes his head and marvels at the beauty of his hair . . . Curled on the closet floor, he hugs his own body and sometimes, listening to these beautiful women’s voices or feeling their breasts, his hand slips into his pants and he strokes himself and whines and pants until a blaze of light happens in his brain, after which he can relax and sometimes fall asleep. One day he’s doing this and suddenly the blaze of light turns into a real light, pale and appalling—his foster mother has opened the closet door and flicked on the switch and found him there with his hand inside his pants and his head thrown back, drinking in the slow deep joy of a woman’s flesh moving softly on his skin. She yells, catapulting him out of his reverie, then grabs the weapon nearest to hand—the long metal tube of the vacuum cleaner—and clobbers him over the head with it: God forgive me, but if I don’t beat this evil out of you there’ll be no hope left, you’ll grow up to be a criminal just like your parents! Bad seed on bad ground! As her blows rain down on Milo’s head and back andshoulders—his arms protect his face—the woman also kicks him with her pointed shoes wherever she can fit a kick in . . .
    YOU’RE RIGHT, MILO—MOVIEGOERS enjoy blood and gore of all sorts; they’ll watch in mesmerized delight as people cut each other’s head off, stab each other in the back, or bomb whole cities to oblivion; many of them also revel in seeing adult males rape little girls; but for some reason, though it’s one of the most widespread forms of violence on the planet, grown women hitting little boys makes them squirm . . . Go figure, eh?
    (Hear that, Milo? You’ve even taught me to say eh? like a Canadian. Hey. Are you doing all right? Are we doing all right? Can we go on, my love? I love you, Astuto. Let’s go on. Yes, yes, we’ll change the name, no problem—do it in a single click, soon as we finish the first draft . . .)
    THE LITTLE BASTARD knows how to read now, in English. He learned to read with a vengeance. Having completed the first two grades of school in a single year, he reads everything he can get his hands on, even if it’s only the dreary Reader’s Digest in the bathroom or the newspaper called the Gazette or the Bible his current foster mother keeps on her bedside table for daily inspiration. The printed words waft him away to freedom, set his mind spinning with stories. The main thing is to be out of this world, out, out . . .
    Though we can also toss in a few images of Milo’s so-called real life during those years (Milo in the classroom, his attention riveted on the teacher, on the blackboard, oblivious to the children around him . . . Milo in the school courtyard, bullied by older boys and unexpectedly fighting back so that within three seconds the leader’s nose is gushing with blood . . . Milo walking home alone in the four o’clock December dark . . . Milo shoveling snow . . .mowing the lawn . . . sitting stiff and straight on the pew of a Protestant church between two stiff and straight adults, one male, one female, whose heads we’ll never see), it’s clear that his real real life now unfolds inside the closet, in the dark of the dark. Ecstasy of images, voices drifting through silence . . . He’s become addicted to solitude.
    And then—brutally—he gets weaned of it. Cold turkey.
    He comes home from school one warm June day, opens the screen door and brings up short. His foster parents (still headless torsos) are seated in the front