Remember your favorite story about my inability to cry? The encyclopedia story? The incident took place when I was four and we had just moved to 222 Hill Drive in the Sandpits Apartments so you could take over the local barbershop. You had left me in the den with my plastic dinosaurs while you unpacked dishes in the kitchen. A dreadful racket soon had you scurrying back to the den, where you discovered that the bookshelves on which you had placed a set of encyclopedias earlier had proven too flimsy. Three shelves had given way, scattering volumes A to Z. There I sat among the toppled books, staring placidly into the face of my toy ankylosaur, a dinosaur with an armored body and a bony tail club.

“A whole bookshelf of encyclopedias fell on our little egghead,” you said, Mother, in wonder, “and he still didn’t crack.”

“Our son has the head of an ankylosaur!” you added, Father.

Oh, how I liked when you told that story! I miss you, Mother and Father. Given my holey heart, you must have braced yourselves for my early death, but surely you did not expect my life to be snuffed out by a boy with a gun.