***

I’ve been living abroad for a couple of years now, most of that time in poverty and lonesomeness. It’s a long story, and I’d rather not get into it.

A few nights ago my neighbor, a quiet young Welshman, whooped his boy’s ass for the first time. The boy is five years old and also very quiet. The two live next door without a woman in their life, though they’ve never mentioned why.

Like every other intense human moment in this cheapshit tenement, the whooping came through the walls loud and clear. I say it was the first time because each of them sounded new to it. Right before the whooping occurred, I heard the young man carefully explain the procedure. I heard him tell his son to bend across the table and lock his hands behind his head. I heard his voice slip out of anger and become tender and patient. I heard the boy beg and make huge promises.

Then there were three hard whacks, and the child wailed like a demon. He shrieked and shrieked and shrieked. Then the shrieking stopped, and the room got very still, almost delicate, and there was weeping, torrential and deep, several blubbering declarations of hate, and finally more weeping—the whole convulsing outburst partially suppressed as though it were being muffled by a shoulder or big soft belly, getting stifled by embrace.

I listened from my kitchen, drying a pot that was pretty dry already.

That night it took me a while to get to sleep. I kept thinking about my neighbor’s son and whether he’d ever look back someday and intricately remember his first-ever ass whooping the way that I remembered mine.

I thought a long time about where the kid would be when that memory came back to him, what he might be doing with his life, and whether he’d ever find himself drying a pot in some cheapshit tenement abroad one day, listening to another little boy desperately atone for something he shouldn’t have done, then finally fall quiet, hopelessly quiet, as the old bastard moved deafly across the room, softened his voice, and explained the way it would work.

 

Timothy L. Marsh is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University Wales. His stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, The Evansville Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Fourth River (forthcoming). He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and was recently longlisted for the New Welsh Writing Award: WWF Prize for Writing on Nature and the Environment.