We must sacrifice with all our hearts.
Even if others do not know us.
We must fight to save the world.

— unknown man sitting in front of the church at Zitlala

✦

That blond boy is going to save the world. His birth was preordained. The breakers of hope and the eaters of love, slithering and wet and as long as your intestines are, long as they need to be—they don’t stand a chance. His secret club met after school and devised a plan. And he—the greatest scout of all, with so many badges, kind and intelligent, strong and quick, devoted to God and beloved of angels—put it into action. He did everything right. And he has by God he has the power of friendship.

That blond boy is tied up in a garbage bag.

Only Cancer remains.

You smell him a mile away, wearing his stomach for lip gloss. In a shaft of atoll sun, merciless except where the trees cut it, bleeding shadows across those slender legs. A tight little backpack throws his back back, leather straps with steel snaps digging into the soft wet clam meat of his armpits.

His ribbon-bound neck sweats from gym class, and the strain of throwing up. Rape whistle sticks to his soaked white shirt, clinging to the nearly-translucent hollow of his sternum. His teeth peek out, pastel braces wrapping his overbite in colored bands of tight rubber. He sees you, and thick dark eyebrows dig into his skull.

✦

Cancer with the blond streak through his black bangs, peroxide purified.

Cancer with the bloodpink ribbon around his neck like a permanent slash of the carotid.

Cancer with the fetal alcohol syndrome.

Cancer at the altar, a wafer on his tongue.

Will this, too, turn to filth inside him? Or vanish miraculously?

Cross the marble floor. Approach the porcelain font of holy water. Seraphed or plain, the font is always the same. His reflection in the tranquil water, which flows from the CrystalSpring, free of algal pink and tropical sin. This water does not carry the blood of our stain of our—

Confess your sins.

Cancer Prize. Snug ribbon. Smug face. Member of the Halo Club. A real good boy. Real tight ass. So anal.

Confess.

He’s been slovenly. He knows all kinds of words to describe his mistakes. Slovenly, like damp, moldy leaves hanging over him. Skipped his shower again. He doesn’t know why. The handle was turning. Screeching. Whining—

I was lazy. That’s a good one. It’s a stupid kind of bad. The kind they can beat out of you. He can’t tell anyone about the mess inside him—

Confess.

He is self-conscious about his mouth. The cleft lip was poorly repaired, stretching his lip a little too tight, already congenitally inclined to showing off his braceface overbite. Wired with gold and he’s so grateful. What it means to him, is he gets to be an angel too. When he was fostered, it was like getting to visit heaven early. But it took time to correct his congenital fangs. Orthodontic headgear, drooling for a year. And lots of drilling. Now the overbite is the only thing keeping him from the family photo and four perfect smiles. He wants to hide in a dark place until then. But at this moment, he’s forced to expose everything, fingers digging under the ribbon as his throat convulses and he drops to his knees and the marble turns to tile and the porcelain fills with toilet paper. The gawky cartilage of his throat stretches the ribbon, bulging with the contents of his stomach, which explode over his teeth in a spray of acid, spattering the interior and slopping into the bowl as his rape whistle clatters against the sides, dangling and soaked.

Cancer watches his caustic saliva stream into the chunky soup like the hanging vines of a cenote, strands of drool whipping back up into his mouth, tainted with toilet water. The smell makes his esophagus paranoid, muscles tightening as his sinuses inhale more fuel for the part of his brain that says, we have been poisoned, or, we have entered an unclean place—

He can still smell it. Black and glistening. The bloated trash bag. He stuck his knife into the taut plastic, iridescent blade swallowed by that black void, and death burst from it. A snapshot of terror and decomposition.

The bag was full of all the chocolate bars the scout didn’t sell, a brown bog body pregnant with decomposition, every fold of his lungs coated with inhaled chocolate and fecal particulate. Gold wrappers covered him like an imperial dress of lamellar scales, blinding him with riches. INNOCENT INNOCENT it said over his eyes. INNOCENT CHOCOLATE.

Cancer’s backpack lays on the floor, bars spilling out like bullion. $4 TEKN (teocuitlatl, ‘excrement of the gods’; GOLD)/$2 XERAFIM/$1 QUEENMARK. His stomach gurgles lower down. He pushes the bars back inside, against the cooling strip, so they won’t melt everywhere. He didn’t notice he was holding his breath. His lungs heave, sudden and deprived, and a fat flare of acid reignites his throat—

Flies and ants swarmed the flapping slit of the trash bag within seconds, coating the scout’s precious biomass like the ash of a pyre corpse. Under the dark static of vermin, under the mud of death, was someone like you. But the uniform had been ripped open, and there was no ribbon. Throat swollen under a deep sea rictus, as if the sin the ribbon was holding back had burst free.

Cancer hopes he got sick, somehow, from the corpse. He was in the same black cloud of insects, dots of feces and blood hovering in the air, tainted with parasites. He always liked being sick. It meant someone had to take care of him. And it was, if you think about it, a kind of drug. Misty vision, time distortion, altered thinking, purging of the digestive tract. And when he is sick, he gets medicine. And medicine is a drug.

Painkillers. Who doesn’t want to kill pain?

The bittersweet dessert of cough syrup. He drank a whole bottle once. His prayers were extra vivid that night and he felt extremely devoted to God. His eyes kept rolling back to heaven. Nauseous wings sprung from his heels and wrists and he flew naked through the shower. He threw up and watched the purple slime flow down the drain, hot water raining on his back. It smelled good and he wished all his insides were like that.

The chunky soles of his hiking boots are splayed behind him, looking too big for his skinny legs, like a toon rabbit. Gold crucifixes dangle like charms from the stitching, jangling with his heaving. His knees ache on the tile, bruising just above the long socks, but if he stands, he thinks his stomach would snap like a trap.

A little air comes up and he touches his mouth, covering it from an invisible viewer. Is he going to throw up again? Stinking, thinking. Bile radiates. Tilt your nose away. Or it will happen again.

He folds his hands, nose tilted upward, away from the puke, toward the heavens. In the shrine, there is so much amazing dialog. The agony of hell, and the sweet release of repentance. But only the toilet makes him feel it. This desperate, feverish bargaining, forced into a full body prayer, folded over, kneeling, hands tight, oral repetition—martyred until he’s expelled all his sin in a tangible, look-at-it, smell-it sludge.

This is your prayer.

I am afraid of acid.

I am afraid of being dissolved.

fragments of a rough draft. i hope to write more when i have time.