Fifteen years old—old enough to be pulled to the door by the cosmic tug of Friday nights, but too young and scared to be able to go out and do anything. Hong Kong is no city for boys who haven’t learned how to make bad decisions.

He knew I needed him to talk, so he wasn’t saying anything. I stared straight ahead at signs written in Dutch, with drawings of happy people washing hands for safety.
The doctor came in. He was tall and pale with rusty hair. I imagined him building a windmill with his bare hands, sawing the wood, standing nobly underneath. I kept crying even after he told me it was just a bacterial infection, and he looked at me strangely, as if I hadn’t understood.
It will be cured in two days, with cream,” …

Skinsky in his backyard in June.
Skinsky in socks and shorts, aureolas flaring, squeaking across the grass to his trampoline and beginning a bounce. Skinsky working hard, curling his toes as he lands and gaining elevation. Skinsky at the height of the low branches on the big tree and rising. Skinsky landing, rebounding and flinging himself up to the summit of his bounce. Skinsky with a Skinsky’s-eye view of everything: roofs, trees, his backyard and his audience in it. Skinsky in back flip. Skinsky in front flip. Skinsky announcing he has …

We didn’t believe when we first heard, because you know how church folks can gossip. Like the time the elders were convinced Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a lesbian when she began playing rugby in college. For weeks, we heard the grown folks whisper about how no girl should be playing football—it just wasn’t right—and it must have been that roommate who had come onto her in the middle of the night and turned her gay, until she showed up to Easter service holding hands with a shy …

In a wonderful world where grass sprouts and divided cells sing the words of the Elevator Blues, which unofficially goes, “Give a little piece of the pie, we would all love to be refined,” Aaron Veedon was popped out and turkey bastered to breathing.  His heart, the four-chambered rhythm machine already formed and months old, fluttered to a start without any maternal guidance.  Every time his mother ate, sang, laughed, played records, got into a scented bath, or was touched gently on the back of her neck or along the …