Beach Ball

“It is the sun.” The woman says. She has gray streaks through her black hair. She is plump. Nobody gets into her either—not her speeches, anyway.

The sun is yellow and round and hot. The boy is small and round and fat. He does not think that it is the sun. He was in the desert, once, when he was five. Now, he is six. He saw the sun when he was in the desert. That is a beach ball, he thinks.

The beach ball is yellow and round and it is hot. The little boy thinks it is hot. The little boy is on the beach. He plays with the beach ball on the beach. The beach is hot, he thinks. He waves to his mother, she has driven their home to the beach. Their home is a trailer. The men with dirty clothes and no shoes walked behind the trailer to the beach.

Now, there are dirty men at the beach. They have dirty clothes and they smell bad and they look like they want things from the people who do not smell bad. Once, when the boy was in math class his teacher said: “If A = B then all of A is the same as all of B.”

“Oh.” The boy said. He was fat. He should not have been in the math class but it wasn’t his math class it was his brother’s math class and his brother was busy feeling his classmate up. She was cute and slutty and born in a trailer and the other boys all felt her breasts and wrote about her in the bathroom stalls.

“We all live in trailers, now.” Manny says. His English is good but he looks like he is from one of the islands in the Caribbean so everyone laughs when he speaks. Manny has not felt the girl’s breasts. He has not felt any girl’s breasts. He is shy and small and his friends think that he is gay but he is only nine years old. He really should start feeling girl’s breasts.

That is what the high school football team says. But they all live in trailers now. It is not as funny when they feel up the girl who lives in a trailer but isn’t the girl who lived in the trailer. They think that it is more like, ‘Oh.’ Instead of coercing the cheerleaders into the showers, the boys have started to masturbate behind their teachers’ trailers. Then they run away.

“We all live in trailers, now.”

But it is really nothing to get into—they all live in trailers. Trailers are small and do not have many rooms and when they do have rooms the rooms are narrow and dark.

“At least you can drive your trailer to the beach.” The dirty man who does not have a trailer says when he is at the beach. All the men at the beach are dirty. The clean people have moved to another beach where you cannot drive your trailers to. The little boy looks up—first at the man, then at the sun. Maybe it is the sun, he thinks.

The sun is yellow and round and hot. But there are many things that are yellow and round and hot. If I am short and fat and six then that is me. He looks at the beach. He sees another short and fat kid. If he is six, he thinks, then there are two of me. The little boy is angry and starts to cry.

Maybe we don’t all live in trailers.


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