SandScript 2021

even call it by name. Something that the
mothers in the neighborhood whispered
about at the bus stop. What the fathers
watched from the corner of their eyes
while mowing the lawns. Nobody looked
at it straight on. No one addressed it. And
I didn’t even know it was a thing. Child
abuse.
I lived across the street from
Benjamin, and I watched, hiding myself
behind the vinyl vertical blinds of my
empty living room. I always felt like the
outcast at school, living in a subsidized
apartment, my mother long-gone, my
father never home. I prayed often that I
was adopted, that my real parents would
show up and rescue me. From my life. But
looking at Benjamin, the ratcheting grip of
the diaper that squeezed and licked his
purple limbs, the shame that flogged his
posture, I knew that what I had was a life
of absolute privilege.
The titian sun set, its russet blood
spread along the splash of the Arizona sky
where it met the horizon, what seemed
like the edge of the world, that long streak
of sapphire ink where I thought everything
stopped, like the outline of a boundary on
a map. I wanted to run to it and jump off,
to be covered in the watercolor, to drift
into the stipple of a calm that I thought
could only be brought by oblivion. I
looked out the glass and knew that if
anyone could relate, it was Benjamin.
***
The next year, he showed up to
school wearing a dress. This time, it was
a punishment from his mother. For what,
I still don’t know. I was eating my lunch
in the bathroom, alone, hiding from the
30
other kids when I snuck out to drink from
the water fountain. I heard a sound from
the boys’ room.
I looked over and saw Benjamin
hiding behind the half-open door, the
weight of its industrial size heavier than
he could handle. The door slipped every
second or two, whispering peesh, peesh,
as the rubber strip at its base swept the
ground, and I pictured his undernourished
arms on the other side struggling to keep
himself hidden.
“Jenny, right?”
I nodded.
He opened the door a bit wider
and waved for me to go inside. I looked
behind me to the empty corridor. I had