I made myself a smooth oil for my parents so they could move better together. Many times they would not have touched if I hadn’t come between them. It’s true only the ugliest, the birds most bloated on refuse, came and stared in at our windows, and the neighbours thought my mother’s singing was one perpetual scream. They had not seen the pencil marks, the stab wounds in my brother’s arms. It was I who was singing — crazy as a loon in the basement, each one of my hands a web that kept me struggling over the past. For there was everywhere suction then — in and out. One day I would be blood red and four years old, another day just a sliver of myself waiting to pierce someone — anyone. Just like my mother who was always hacking at herself with the scissors, turning up face down in the bathroom sink, every drop of water threatening to turn red with her blood in my hand. And every time I see my father’s face that fell down from the quarry, half of it carried off by the world for temples and the other half so lean with that one mad eye staring out like a Greek statue, I cry. There was no shadow I could lie down in that wasn’t his. A statue, a tree, a mountain — each one of them owed something of their darkness to his nature. I fell to brooding. I plotted escapes. Perhaps there was a stone I could run into and be cool and silent forever. Or perhaps I could take on immensities behind the moon and suddenly emerge far bigger than he. But how my stem-mouth shrieked when he walked by me. I became excessively obedient. I bent even when there was no wind. Then, by degrees again, because it is my nature — innocent, arrogant, supersensitive — at one point, if someone as far away as a mile struck a match, a small glow would appear over my mouth and not fade for days. For a time I was almost always unbearably bright. There were fires everywhere and my father didn’t like it. He said our family had a long history of water. It had always been good enough for them to dance, to sing, and fill things. No son of his was gonna be a flame. Then he threw himself on me and there was a big hiss. Luckily, just then, my mother came running out. “No Ted!” she screamed, and for the first time I saw the tiny flickering at the base of her throat: the impossible flame blood couldn’t lead out of her but it glowed there forever with my blood and hers. Even there, where I was — somewhere the other side of burning — it reached me and my father said, “Alright then, he’s your son, he’s not mine.”