Eleven Seconds With The Velveteen Boy
Whenever the Velveteen Boy touched a doorknob, the door came unlocked. There’d been a time when he’d been careful about
trespassing, but no one ever seemed to see him when he didn’t want to be seen.
He lived in the house he’d grown up in, had rarely left in his twenty years, other than to go to school. But after his father died, he
began to wander. He nocturnally explored the abandoned courthouse, the closed wing of the mental hospital, and the Jaycees’
haunted house. He recognized territory others hadn’t ventured into by the lack of graffiti on the walls, and finding these places made
him feel alive, something simply breathing and thinking had failed to do.
He ventured out into daylight sometimes, never to crowded places, afraid of seeing anyone who knew him.
He discovered his nickname in a yearbook at a yard sale where he was the only shopper.
“That’s my daughter’s,” the woman selling the yearbook told him. “Maybe you know her.”
He did. He found her name inside, read what her few friends had written to her.
“Why are you selling it?” He pitched his voice a little deeper than normal.
“She’s selling it. She’ll regret it. Some wacky religion thing.”
He held his breath and flipped to his senior photo from two years before, knowing he shouldn’t look, like staring into a car as you pass
the crash, the police waving you on.
“She’s been switching religions back and forth since she was a little girl,” the woman said.
The horrendous picture of himself made him start. He’d worn a suit, though his father had told him he didn’t have to. Long hair pulled
back. He looked positively Eurotrash. But what the religious girl had written beside his picture touched him. He knew it might be,
probably was, an insult, but maybe not. She’d been one of the ones who’d politely ignored him.
He adopted her nickname for him as if he’d thought of it himself. He bought the yearbook for one dollar and propped it open on his
desk, drew colorful vines around the words beside his photo, “The Velveteen Boy.” It was fitting, he thought. Like the Velveteen
Rabbit, he’d been loved too much from the time he was a child, was ragged from it. And so the name he’d been given at birth had
been obliterated from his mind when he went too far with the paperboy.
They’d seen each other before at that time of the early morning, when it was still a little dark. They’d never spoken. The paperboy
was around fifteen, old enough to know the Velveteen Boy for what he was, but not yet rude enough to make an issue of it. Or maybe
he would have if he’d been with his friends, used words like fag or freak. But the paperboy was alone, and it was an hour before
sunrise, and maybe the paperboy wasn’t even fully awake. He stopped his bike on the sidewalk on a deserted section of Sinjun Street
and asked the Velveteen Boy, “You’re a guy, right?”
It wasn’t the easiest question to answer, but technically, it was true. “Yeah.”
“Are you gay, or do you just look that way?”
Again, not that simple, but why complicate things? “The first one.”
“You want to blow me?” Ah, the brashness of the young. If the paperboy had been with his friends, this would have been a joke,
possibly a precursor to violence. But he was alone. And cute. And horny. You could see it in his eyes.
“Sure,” said the Velveteen Boy.
The paperboy slid off his bike and walked it into an alley. The Velveteen Boy followed.
It happened more often than people probably thought, usually with older guys, always guys who were probably straight for the most
part, always guys alone. Some of them treated him well, some didn’t. The paperboy was by far the youngest, and the Velveteen Boy
would have felt guilty if he’d done anything other than get the kid off. It took exactly eleven seconds. Quick, but not if it was the kid’s
first blowjob. And really, eleven seconds was a long time.
One… two… three… four… five… six… seven… eight… nine… ten… eleven.
It was an eternity.
He expected the kid to run away afterward, get on his bike and tear out of the alley. Instead, he offered the Velveteen Boy a beer. “I’ve
got a stash. I find them on my route.”
“Unopened?”
“Yeah. People party outside, bring their beer out and forget it.”
“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”
“Okay, well.” He did get on his bike then. “See ya.”
“You watch who else you go down alleys with.”
The paperboy smiled like a boyfriend assuring his sweetheart. “I’m not going down alleys with anyone else.”
Off he rode, leaving the Velveteen Boy wanting to be someplace familiar, someplace personal. Somebody’s home.
He only explored two private homes on a regular basis, both on Lotos Street, an upscale block downtown peopled with young artists,
probably all recipients of trust funds. Ten minutes after sunrise, so gold in October, the Velveteen Boy found himself on Lotos Street,
in the middle of the road, between two houses that had been built a hundred years before, with tall dormers and long trellised
porches. The Velveteen Boy knew both houses well, but a high wall surrounded the one to his left, so from where he stood, he could
only see the one on his right.
The house’s porch practically hung over the sidewalk. Its stone steps grew wider as they spilled toward the street. It had a walled yard
as well, off to the side of the house, the wall so high he couldn’t see over it. A metal pole rose behind the wall. Atop the pole, a metal
ball, about two feet in diameter, burned and rolled in place, the most amazing lawn sculpture he’d ever seen.
He longed to go inside as he had several times before, but the Fireball Man would be home soon. The men who lived in both these
houses would drag themselves home shortly if they hadn’t already. They did sometimes return before sunrise, like vampires, but
usually closer to this hour, when no amount of drugs or booze they’d ingested could fool them into thinking anything remained of the
night.
The man who lived in the house on the left side of the street was the Halloween Man. The Velveteen Boy had never actually seen him
but had tried on his clothes, virtual tents draping the Velveteen Boy’s shoulders. His feet looked like a child’s in the Halloween Man’s
shoes. The Halloween Man’s stone wall hid the entire ground floor of his house. Dark orange shades covered all the upstairs
windows. An iron gate, set off to the side of the property, allowed a view of his forested yard.
The Velveteen Boy felt the heat drain from his shoulders, his torso. He felt for a moment that he might fall down. The Halloween Man
stood inside his gate, watching him. Behind the Halloween Man, the trees — sunny at their tips, so shady underneath — shivered in
the breeze.
The Halloween Man was huge, maybe an entire foot taller or more than the Velveteen Boy, at least a hundred pounds larger. The
Velveteen Boy had known the Halloween Man’s hair was dark because he’d seen the strands in his hairbrush. But in the flesh…
His arms were bigger than the Velveteen Boy’s legs.
The Velveteen Boy wanted to run. He just wasn’t sure which way he wanted to go —away from the Halloween Man or toward him.
Before he made his mind up, the Halloween Man moved away from the gate, out of sight.
* * *
The following night, the air had chilled and smelled like rain. It tempted the Velveteen Boy to stay warm and dry at home, but he put on
his raincoat, took his flashlight from his closet, and ventured out.
The tree branches hung heavier over the sidewalks than before. A mist sparkled in the gray moonlight, dampening his cheeks and
hair. Walk signs flashed on each time he approached an intersection. Traffic cleared out of each street he turned onto. He didn’t see
another pedestrian all the way across town.
He arrived at Lotos Street just after midnight. He sensed the Halloween Man at home and was afraid to approach his house, but the
Fireball Man’s house felt empty.
The door unlocked when he turned the knob.
He went straight to the room at the rear of the house, the travel room. A hundred or more photographs hung on the seafoam-colored
walls. Galapagos. Easter Island. China, India, and Borneo. The Velveteen Boy turned in a circle in the center of the room, scanning
the framed black and whites with the flashlight, making them play like a slide show. He imagined traveling with the Fireball Man, posing
with him in photos next to the ocean or in front of an ancient temple. The wind blowing his hair. The Fireball Man tucking it behind his
ear for him.
He felt an unfamiliar sensation, a discomfort at being in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be.
A door leaving the photograph room led to the Fireball Man’s yard, which smelled like flames and dewy earth. The fireball illuminated
shrubs and flowers, birdbaths and pathways — part English garden or something a grandma would create and part dark fairy tale.
For half a second, when a light came on inside the Fireball Man’s house, the Velveteen Boy thought the fireball had surged.
The Fireball Man was home. But not alone.
The Velveteen Boy crept back to the house and into the side door, listening to them chat about a film they’d just seen as they climbed
the stairs. His voice was higher than the Velveteen Boy had imagined. Hers lilted, as if she wanted to sing but didn’t quite have the
nerve. The Velveteen Boy followed them to the second floor, where they wasted no time.
The Velveteen Boy had seen straight sex before, had wandered past open windows, observed teenagers on dirty mattresses in empty
buildings. The Fireball Man and the woman he’d brought home didn’t do anything that was new to the Velveteen Boy. But he could
only watch for a few seconds after their bodies struck a rhythm. Though he’d never met the Fireball Man, watching him made the
Velveteen Boy think of his father, think of the paperboy. Sex had never made him feel anything before. And what he felt was guilt.
Nausea. Jealousy.
He wanted to take his own member, ignored even by him, and yank it until he couldn’t hold back a scream.
He slammed the front door as he left.
At home, he cried and touched himself gently, fell asleep to the sound of sirens.
* * *
The morning paper reported that, though the fire inspector believed the fire’s source had been the gas-powered lawn ornament, he
found the path of the fire “baffling.” He gave no details as to why. The Fireball Man lay unconscious in the ICU after falling down the
stairs. His date had been treated and released. His house at 312 Lotos Street was structurally intact, and would likely be repaired.
The Velveteen Boy felt he’d caused the fire, the fall, by slamming the door, though in the fire’s case he couldn’t understand how. It
was like the science he’d never grasped at school. It worked like magic to him.
No more slamming doors, he decided. No making a sound when someone came home.
With power came responsibility.
* * *
That night, he set out again. The scent of burnt things kept him at a distance from the Fireball Man’s house. It looked like an inept
painter had used a ruined brush to try to cover it in black stain. The dark immobile ball on the pole behind the wall loomed like a dead
sun.
The Halloween Man’s house was dark, as usual.
From the outside of the Halloween Man’s house, nothing seemed Halloween-ish. No gargoyles leered down. No eerie weathervanes
spun in the wind. The Velveteen Boy entered the gate into the side yard. The house, like the Fireball Man’s, had a long front porch.
On the porch stood a tall dark figure, facing him, absolutely still. It wasn’t broad enough to be the Halloween Man. The Velveteen Boy
thought he knew what this was, though he hadn’t seen one outside the house before. “Hello,” he said to it, his voice cracking as if it
might finally change and grow deep.
It didn’t answer.
He walked toward it, shining his flashlight around its feet where its long black robe gathered on the cement porch. The Velveteen Boy
raised the light to the figure’s hooded head.
It was a dummy, a tall mannequin dressed as an ancient wrinkled witch, with deep folds of skin on its face and neck, bloodshot eyes
made of glass. The Velveteen Boy trained the flashlight onto the house and the silhouettes of the other still figures inside. The
Halloween Man moved them around every day or every night before he left. The Velveteen Boy always feared and fantasized that one
of them was alive, waiting for him. He passed the mannequin on the porch and turned the knob on the front door, felt the familiar click
as the door unbolted.
Ceramic jack o’ lanterns, black cats, and skeletons adorned the Halloween Man’s shelves and tables. Mannequins dressed as witches
stood in groups of two or three, heads cocked at one another as if in conversation: a beautiful blonde with long hair, dressed in black
with a pointy hat; a grime-covered skeleton witch with black eye sockets, dressed in rags and bone jewelry; everything in between.
The Velveteen Boy made his rounds.
Escher prints covered most of the walls. The kitchen sported a wood-burning stove and wooden icebox. The shelves held glass jars
labeled as everything from “salt” and “cayenne pepper” to “graveyard dust” and “Roger’s fingernails.”
Nothing ever changed much.
One bedroom upstairs had a slept-in bed, one that was never made. Nearly everything in the room was a shade of orange, from
pumpkin to deep golden brown. The Velveteen Boy curled up in the bed sometimes, breathing the scent of the sheets and pillow.
Somehow clean-smelling sweat. Unfragranced man.
Sometimes, he closed his eyes and wished for the Halloween Man to find him there.
Sometimes he slept.
This time, he awoke to the weight of the Halloween Man sitting on the edge of the bed.
* * *
In the beginning, for several weeks, the Halloween Man’s hands and voice reminded the Velveteen Boy of his father. He felt no cruelty
in their persuasion, but he felt strength. Force. Direction. He’d always thought he might like being held prisoner, but the Halloween
Man only held him with his will. The Velveteen Boy slept only when he was told to. Eventually, he only got hungry when the Halloween
Man told him to eat.
The Halloween Man loved being called Halloween Man.
That was the Halloween Man’s problem, the Velveteen Boy figured out later: letting his boy name him. It was a way of being owned.
The Halloween Man lasted far more than eleven seconds, but it felt more fleeting with him. Every time the Halloween Man left him,
alone on the unmade bed, it was as if nothing had happened at all.
The Velveteen Boy watched out the upstairs windows. After his stay in the hospital, the Fireball Man limped. He was smaller, certainly
weaker than the Halloween Man. But on his first night home, he turned his fireball on and started painting his walls.
That was strength.
For a week after the Fireball Man came home, the Velveteen Boy prowled Lotos Street whenever the Halloween Man was temporarily
finished with him. He watched the Fireball Man through his windows. And then he climbed the Fireball Man’s front steps and did
something he’d never done in his life. He knocked on a door.
* * *
The Velveteen Boy knew both friendships, pairings, whatever, were doomed from the beginning, but he couldn’t say why. He’d
counted himself lucky to find two attractive men so close to each other, one with gay porn not exactly hidden in his bedroom, the other
straight, but worldly, too liberal to judge, so determined to be open-minded that he could consider the Velveteen Boy a female if the
Velveteen Boy told him that was the gender of his soul.
Amazing. Everyone ruled by need. And yet pliable. Even the Yearbook Girl, stubbornly religious but fluid in her beliefs.
Hard. But soft.
The morning after his last night on Lotos Street, after he’d taken enough from both men there, the Velveteen Boy passed the
paperboy’s alley. The paperboy’s bike lay on its side thirty feet in, where the shadows grew thick.
A few feet beyond, light and steam seeped from the air vents of the cheap restaurants on either side of the alley walls. The paperboy
lay next to a vent, sleeping with his head on half a bundle of newspapers, stretched out on his back with five empty beer cans around
his head.
The small but hard lump in the crotch of his jeans twitched.
The warmth from the vents rose like a flood, smelling of grease and sweat.
The Paper Boy snored softly, a man in the making.
Whenever the Velveteen Boy touched a doorknob, the door came unlocked. There’d been a time when he’d been careful about
trespassing, but no one ever seemed to see him when he didn’t want to be seen.
He lived in the house he’d grown up in, had rarely left in his twenty years, other than to go to school. But after his father died, he
began to wander. He nocturnally explored the abandoned courthouse, the closed wing of the mental hospital, and the Jaycees’
haunted house. He recognized territory others hadn’t ventured into by the lack of graffiti on the walls, and finding these places made
him feel alive, something simply breathing and thinking had failed to do.
He ventured out into daylight sometimes, never to crowded places, afraid of seeing anyone who knew him.
He discovered his nickname in a yearbook at a yard sale where he was the only shopper.
“That’s my daughter’s,” the woman selling the yearbook told him. “Maybe you know her.”
He did. He found her name inside, read what her few friends had written to her.
“Why are you selling it?” He pitched his voice a little deeper than normal.
“She’s selling it. She’ll regret it. Some wacky religion thing.”
He held his breath and flipped to his senior photo from two years before, knowing he shouldn’t look, like staring into a car as you pass
the crash, the police waving you on.
“She’s been switching religions back and forth since she was a little girl,” the woman said.
The horrendous picture of himself made him start. He’d worn a suit, though his father had told him he didn’t have to. Long hair pulled
back. He looked positively Eurotrash. But what the religious girl had written beside his picture touched him. He knew it might be,
probably was, an insult, but maybe not. She’d been one of the ones who’d politely ignored him.
He adopted her nickname for him as if he’d thought of it himself. He bought the yearbook for one dollar and propped it open on his
desk, drew colorful vines around the words beside his photo, “The Velveteen Boy.” It was fitting, he thought. Like the Velveteen
Rabbit, he’d been loved too much from the time he was a child, was ragged from it. And so the name he’d been given at birth had
been obliterated from his mind when he went too far with the paperboy.
They’d seen each other before at that time of the early morning, when it was still a little dark. They’d never spoken. The paperboy
was around fifteen, old enough to know the Velveteen Boy for what he was, but not yet rude enough to make an issue of it. Or maybe
he would have if he’d been with his friends, used words like fag or freak. But the paperboy was alone, and it was an hour before
sunrise, and maybe the paperboy wasn’t even fully awake. He stopped his bike on the sidewalk on a deserted section of Sinjun Street
and asked the Velveteen Boy, “You’re a guy, right?”
It wasn’t the easiest question to answer, but technically, it was true. “Yeah.”
“Are you gay, or do you just look that way?”
Again, not that simple, but why complicate things? “The first one.”
“You want to blow me?” Ah, the brashness of the young. If the paperboy had been with his friends, this would have been a joke,
possibly a precursor to violence. But he was alone. And cute. And horny. You could see it in his eyes.
“Sure,” said the Velveteen Boy.
The paperboy slid off his bike and walked it into an alley. The Velveteen Boy followed.
It happened more often than people probably thought, usually with older guys, always guys who were probably straight for the most
part, always guys alone. Some of them treated him well, some didn’t. The paperboy was by far the youngest, and the Velveteen Boy
would have felt guilty if he’d done anything other than get the kid off. It took exactly eleven seconds. Quick, but not if it was the kid’s
first blowjob. And really, eleven seconds was a long time.
One… two… three… four… five… six… seven… eight… nine… ten… eleven.
It was an eternity.
He expected the kid to run away afterward, get on his bike and tear out of the alley. Instead, he offered the Velveteen Boy a beer. “I’ve
got a stash. I find them on my route.”
“Unopened?”
“Yeah. People party outside, bring their beer out and forget it.”
“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”
“Okay, well.” He did get on his bike then. “See ya.”
“You watch who else you go down alleys with.”
The paperboy smiled like a boyfriend assuring his sweetheart. “I’m not going down alleys with anyone else.”
Off he rode, leaving the Velveteen Boy wanting to be someplace familiar, someplace personal. Somebody’s home.
He only explored two private homes on a regular basis, both on Lotos Street, an upscale block downtown peopled with young artists,
probably all recipients of trust funds. Ten minutes after sunrise, so gold in October, the Velveteen Boy found himself on Lotos Street,
in the middle of the road, between two houses that had been built a hundred years before, with tall dormers and long trellised
porches. The Velveteen Boy knew both houses well, but a high wall surrounded the one to his left, so from where he stood, he could
only see the one on his right.
The house’s porch practically hung over the sidewalk. Its stone steps grew wider as they spilled toward the street. It had a walled yard
as well, off to the side of the house, the wall so high he couldn’t see over it. A metal pole rose behind the wall. Atop the pole, a metal
ball, about two feet in diameter, burned and rolled in place, the most amazing lawn sculpture he’d ever seen.
He longed to go inside as he had several times before, but the Fireball Man would be home soon. The men who lived in both these
houses would drag themselves home shortly if they hadn’t already. They did sometimes return before sunrise, like vampires, but
usually closer to this hour, when no amount of drugs or booze they’d ingested could fool them into thinking anything remained of the
night.
The man who lived in the house on the left side of the street was the Halloween Man. The Velveteen Boy had never actually seen him
but had tried on his clothes, virtual tents draping the Velveteen Boy’s shoulders. His feet looked like a child’s in the Halloween Man’s
shoes. The Halloween Man’s stone wall hid the entire ground floor of his house. Dark orange shades covered all the upstairs
windows. An iron gate, set off to the side of the property, allowed a view of his forested yard.
The Velveteen Boy felt the heat drain from his shoulders, his torso. He felt for a moment that he might fall down. The Halloween Man
stood inside his gate, watching him. Behind the Halloween Man, the trees — sunny at their tips, so shady underneath — shivered in
the breeze.
The Halloween Man was huge, maybe an entire foot taller or more than the Velveteen Boy, at least a hundred pounds larger. The
Velveteen Boy had known the Halloween Man’s hair was dark because he’d seen the strands in his hairbrush. But in the flesh…
His arms were bigger than the Velveteen Boy’s legs.
The Velveteen Boy wanted to run. He just wasn’t sure which way he wanted to go —away from the Halloween Man or toward him.
Before he made his mind up, the Halloween Man moved away from the gate, out of sight.
* * *
The following night, the air had chilled and smelled like rain. It tempted the Velveteen Boy to stay warm and dry at home, but he put on
his raincoat, took his flashlight from his closet, and ventured out.
The tree branches hung heavier over the sidewalks than before. A mist sparkled in the gray moonlight, dampening his cheeks and
hair. Walk signs flashed on each time he approached an intersection. Traffic cleared out of each street he turned onto. He didn’t see
another pedestrian all the way across town.
He arrived at Lotos Street just after midnight. He sensed the Halloween Man at home and was afraid to approach his house, but the
Fireball Man’s house felt empty.
The door unlocked when he turned the knob.
He went straight to the room at the rear of the house, the travel room. A hundred or more photographs hung on the seafoam-colored
walls. Galapagos. Easter Island. China, India, and Borneo. The Velveteen Boy turned in a circle in the center of the room, scanning
the framed black and whites with the flashlight, making them play like a slide show. He imagined traveling with the Fireball Man, posing
with him in photos next to the ocean or in front of an ancient temple. The wind blowing his hair. The Fireball Man tucking it behind his
ear for him.
He felt an unfamiliar sensation, a discomfort at being in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be.
A door leaving the photograph room led to the Fireball Man’s yard, which smelled like flames and dewy earth. The fireball illuminated
shrubs and flowers, birdbaths and pathways — part English garden or something a grandma would create and part dark fairy tale.
For half a second, when a light came on inside the Fireball Man’s house, the Velveteen Boy thought the fireball had surged.
The Fireball Man was home. But not alone.
The Velveteen Boy crept back to the house and into the side door, listening to them chat about a film they’d just seen as they climbed
the stairs. His voice was higher than the Velveteen Boy had imagined. Hers lilted, as if she wanted to sing but didn’t quite have the
nerve. The Velveteen Boy followed them to the second floor, where they wasted no time.
The Velveteen Boy had seen straight sex before, had wandered past open windows, observed teenagers on dirty mattresses in empty
buildings. The Fireball Man and the woman he’d brought home didn’t do anything that was new to the Velveteen Boy. But he could
only watch for a few seconds after their bodies struck a rhythm. Though he’d never met the Fireball Man, watching him made the
Velveteen Boy think of his father, think of the paperboy. Sex had never made him feel anything before. And what he felt was guilt.
Nausea. Jealousy.
He wanted to take his own member, ignored even by him, and yank it until he couldn’t hold back a scream.
He slammed the front door as he left.
At home, he cried and touched himself gently, fell asleep to the sound of sirens.
* * *
The morning paper reported that, though the fire inspector believed the fire’s source had been the gas-powered lawn ornament, he
found the path of the fire “baffling.” He gave no details as to why. The Fireball Man lay unconscious in the ICU after falling down the
stairs. His date had been treated and released. His house at 312 Lotos Street was structurally intact, and would likely be repaired.
The Velveteen Boy felt he’d caused the fire, the fall, by slamming the door, though in the fire’s case he couldn’t understand how. It
was like the science he’d never grasped at school. It worked like magic to him.
No more slamming doors, he decided. No making a sound when someone came home.
With power came responsibility.
* * *
That night, he set out again. The scent of burnt things kept him at a distance from the Fireball Man’s house. It looked like an inept
painter had used a ruined brush to try to cover it in black stain. The dark immobile ball on the pole behind the wall loomed like a dead
sun.
The Halloween Man’s house was dark, as usual.
From the outside of the Halloween Man’s house, nothing seemed Halloween-ish. No gargoyles leered down. No eerie weathervanes
spun in the wind. The Velveteen Boy entered the gate into the side yard. The house, like the Fireball Man’s, had a long front porch.
On the porch stood a tall dark figure, facing him, absolutely still. It wasn’t broad enough to be the Halloween Man. The Velveteen Boy
thought he knew what this was, though he hadn’t seen one outside the house before. “Hello,” he said to it, his voice cracking as if it
might finally change and grow deep.
It didn’t answer.
He walked toward it, shining his flashlight around its feet where its long black robe gathered on the cement porch. The Velveteen Boy
raised the light to the figure’s hooded head.
It was a dummy, a tall mannequin dressed as an ancient wrinkled witch, with deep folds of skin on its face and neck, bloodshot eyes
made of glass. The Velveteen Boy trained the flashlight onto the house and the silhouettes of the other still figures inside. The
Halloween Man moved them around every day or every night before he left. The Velveteen Boy always feared and fantasized that one
of them was alive, waiting for him. He passed the mannequin on the porch and turned the knob on the front door, felt the familiar click
as the door unbolted.
Ceramic jack o’ lanterns, black cats, and skeletons adorned the Halloween Man’s shelves and tables. Mannequins dressed as witches
stood in groups of two or three, heads cocked at one another as if in conversation: a beautiful blonde with long hair, dressed in black
with a pointy hat; a grime-covered skeleton witch with black eye sockets, dressed in rags and bone jewelry; everything in between.
The Velveteen Boy made his rounds.
Escher prints covered most of the walls. The kitchen sported a wood-burning stove and wooden icebox. The shelves held glass jars
labeled as everything from “salt” and “cayenne pepper” to “graveyard dust” and “Roger’s fingernails.”
Nothing ever changed much.
One bedroom upstairs had a slept-in bed, one that was never made. Nearly everything in the room was a shade of orange, from
pumpkin to deep golden brown. The Velveteen Boy curled up in the bed sometimes, breathing the scent of the sheets and pillow.
Somehow clean-smelling sweat. Unfragranced man.
Sometimes, he closed his eyes and wished for the Halloween Man to find him there.
Sometimes he slept.
This time, he awoke to the weight of the Halloween Man sitting on the edge of the bed.
* * *
In the beginning, for several weeks, the Halloween Man’s hands and voice reminded the Velveteen Boy of his father. He felt no cruelty
in their persuasion, but he felt strength. Force. Direction. He’d always thought he might like being held prisoner, but the Halloween
Man only held him with his will. The Velveteen Boy slept only when he was told to. Eventually, he only got hungry when the Halloween
Man told him to eat.
The Halloween Man loved being called Halloween Man.
That was the Halloween Man’s problem, the Velveteen Boy figured out later: letting his boy name him. It was a way of being owned.
The Halloween Man lasted far more than eleven seconds, but it felt more fleeting with him. Every time the Halloween Man left him,
alone on the unmade bed, it was as if nothing had happened at all.
The Velveteen Boy watched out the upstairs windows. After his stay in the hospital, the Fireball Man limped. He was smaller, certainly
weaker than the Halloween Man. But on his first night home, he turned his fireball on and started painting his walls.
That was strength.
For a week after the Fireball Man came home, the Velveteen Boy prowled Lotos Street whenever the Halloween Man was temporarily
finished with him. He watched the Fireball Man through his windows. And then he climbed the Fireball Man’s front steps and did
something he’d never done in his life. He knocked on a door.
* * *
The Velveteen Boy knew both friendships, pairings, whatever, were doomed from the beginning, but he couldn’t say why. He’d
counted himself lucky to find two attractive men so close to each other, one with gay porn not exactly hidden in his bedroom, the other
straight, but worldly, too liberal to judge, so determined to be open-minded that he could consider the Velveteen Boy a female if the
Velveteen Boy told him that was the gender of his soul.
Amazing. Everyone ruled by need. And yet pliable. Even the Yearbook Girl, stubbornly religious but fluid in her beliefs.
Hard. But soft.
The morning after his last night on Lotos Street, after he’d taken enough from both men there, the Velveteen Boy passed the
paperboy’s alley. The paperboy’s bike lay on its side thirty feet in, where the shadows grew thick.
A few feet beyond, light and steam seeped from the air vents of the cheap restaurants on either side of the alley walls. The paperboy
lay next to a vent, sleeping with his head on half a bundle of newspapers, stretched out on his back with five empty beer cans around
his head.
The small but hard lump in the crotch of his jeans twitched.
The warmth from the vents rose like a flood, smelling of grease and sweat.
The Paper Boy snored softly, a man in the making.
Sandra Maddux-Creech
Stories by Sandra Maddux-Creech have appeared in Summerset Review, THEMA, Arabesques Review, and others. She earned a BA in
Creative Writing at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA at Colorado State University. Her work has received honorable
mention in contests sponsored by Glimmer Train, Minnetonka Review, and Many Mountains Moving. She has completed a novel about a
town disappearing from the map and the earth. Most of her stories happen there, too.
Creative Writing at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA at Colorado State University. Her work has received honorable
mention in contests sponsored by Glimmer Train, Minnetonka Review, and Many Mountains Moving. She has completed a novel about a
town disappearing from the map and the earth. Most of her stories happen there, too.
