The Boy By Fred D. White

There once lived a boy named Boyd who began dressing up as a boy, which was his way of becoming the kind of boy that would make his daddy proud. His mommy didn’t understand his sudden obsession but tolerated it just like she tolerated her husband’s barbs about their son, how he was quickly turning into a faggot, wearing those Speedos, and stargazing through a telescope with his little boyfriend next door. “Why can’t you just be a normal, red-blooded American boy?” his father would always ask, and in the past, Boyd would shrug, hang his head, and hole himself up in his room, but not anymore.

One of Boyd’s American boy costumes consisted of faded denim jeans, cowboy boots, a sleeveless shirt, and a baseball cap sporting a Braves logo. “Now that’s my boy!” his father grunted when he first saw Boyd in his boy costume. What Boyd’s father failed to notice, however, were the claws Boyd had fashioned out of broken glass and glued to his fingertips.

One day in school during lunch, one of Boyd’s classmates, a baby-faced, muscular punk named Lucas, asked Boyd why he was wearing the costume of a well-known TV survivor-man, including a mask that resembled the survivor-man’s gnarled face, to which Boyd replied, “Not just survivor-man,” and pulled up his shirt to expose a belly tattoo of a naked man wrestling a ‘gator.

“You’re more of a fruit-loop than I realized, Boyd,” Lucas said.

“My name isn’t Boyd any longer.”

“What is it, then? Pussyface?”

“Naw,” Boyd said, “I think it’s gonna be Lucas,” and moving too quickly for Lucas to react, Boyd clawed off Lucas’s face and slapped it onto his own.

© 2015 Fred D. White

Fred D. White’s fiction has appeared most recently in The Brooklyner, Burningword, Mad Hat Lit, Atticus Review, and is forthcoming in Rathalla Review. He lives near Sacramento, CA.

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