My wife is teaching me to read and write. It’s not too much so far, slow, almost pitiful, but I’m learning. She’s teaching me the letters first, and the sounds with them.

A B

C D

E F

G H

She’s tried to get me to list off the letters one at a time, but I’m no good at it. I need the beat, the rhythm of letter after letter. A B, not A. B.

Names are forming:

Asu

Kaisho

Fireayou

The last name is mine, the name my mother gave me when she took me into her house. As far as I knew, before I remembered the beginning, it was the first name I ever had.

And words:

Cab

Ass

Bad

Dad

Eat

Fuck

Gods

Fade

Fad

Babe

Face

Dab

And also the name my wife gave me. Just between the two of us.

I am Asu’s Kyo.

As I finished the first sections of her teachings, A B, C D, and the words I could make with it, she asked me if I was proud.

Four big letters (I dislike the little ones. I can do them, but I don’t like them; having two ways to write the same letter seems stupid to me. About as frustrating as all the different sounds. Vowels and consonants. Bullshit.) And three words.

I told her no. I am not proud. I am happy.

I lied to my wife.

I am very proud.

You are my pet, Keta told me. A possession. A thing. Even less than human.

What sounds can you make?

Does he mean animal noises, I thought to myself.

A bird, I replied. I hadn’t learned yet it would only hurt me to talk to him.

Let me hear it, he ordered.

I was perched up on my knees, stripped bare at the end of Keta’s bed, my wrists flat against the wall (this was a rule, if I leaned my weight on my wrists or removed them from the wall punishment would always be swift to follow) with that man whispering into my left ear.

Keta preferred to speak into my left ear. To leave my left eye uncovered. The lover’s side.

I obeyed, chirruping for him. Again, he order, which I did. One more time, he ordered.

I pursed my lips and Keta jumped on me, moved over me and brutally into me at the same time. I choked and the sound never came out. Keta grabbed my hair and pulled my head back.

Fly away little bird, he taunted, fly away if you can.

Fly away little bird.

The morning after Keta captured me I woke aching from every inch of skin. The pain started outside and radiated in, until I couldn’t tell which part was in and what wasn’t, it was a never-ending circle, rotating flesh that he could abuse from all sides.

Keta was waiting for me, a bowl of soup in his lap.

My stomach churned, horror and hunger.

Are you hungry? He asked. He was naked, as usual, and the bowl rested on his knee, one hand supporting it, the other stroking his penis casually.

Yes, I replied.

Are you hungry? He asked again, standing.

I said I was, I replied. The skin over Keta’s nose twitched. I shuddered. Little twitches like this meant pain, always, as I would learn. Around his nose or under his eyes. Around his lips was pleasure. Sexual or a different sense, the sense of breaking, of obliteration. He thrived on the idea of destroying little bits of my filthy body, of my wrecked mind.

What makes you think you can speak to me in such a way? I tried to stand too, but my floor and leg spiraled under me and I fell back down. Keta held the wide brimmed bowl of soup like a weapon, higher up on his chest than one would offhandedly.

Do you want this? He asked me again.

Yes.

Do you want to swallow this?

My stomach sputtered. Yes, I do.

Keta smashed the bowl over my head. I crunched down on myself, trying to get the hot broth out of my eyes, but Keta was already on me, his fingers prying my jaw open. He cut his nails into the gums, sliding the fingers over and as far under my teeth as he could manage.

Then came the glass. He gripped it with both care and ease and brought it down into my mouth, applying the pressure thickly against the left side of my mouth, and the jagged tip down, so that it got around my teeth and into the soft folded flesh between my tongue and jawbone.

Swallow it! He ordered. It cut into my tongue and the blood filtered down my throat and over his fingers. Swallow it. Eat it all.

I coughed, bit down on the hot glass.

Swallow it!

He released my jaw and pushed me down, into the glass that exploded, fireworks bursting back and forth across the skin of my back. They dug in, like an impossible amount of swarming bugs that bit deeper and deeper into my flesh, intent to eat right through me. He grabbed my arms and pushed my hands down into the sheets, so it could cut the tops of them too. Between the weight of both of us the glass moved in, jingling and clashing, down to the center, into my ribs and under, into me, into the openings already created and slipping wider with every pull.

Somewhere along the way Keta was cut and he reared away.

Clean up this mess, he ordered. Get up and care for this filth, he spat, nursing his injured hand.

He was back within a few minutes. I’d pulled away from the sheets and was crouched on the floor, trying to reach my hands all the way around my back to get the glass out of my skin. As I saw him I froze, watching him, and he watched me, until he was annoyed with me. He walked to the bed and removed the sheets himself, throwing them to the floor at my feet, so that glass sprayed out everywhere, shining. He grabbed me by the back of my hair, threw me up on the bed, and raped me again; taking time to make sure the glass was well rubbed into my skin.

The letters I can write are adding up. I’m learning more and more words. My wife quizzed me on every word I knew, and I collected them all on a piece of paper. She and I sat, my side to hers. I was naked and she was nearly.

I never loved my wife more.

Proud is becoming an insignificant word to this feeling.

I once told my mother that if I stood beside her and simply watched her I was sure she would fray right before my eyes. She was angry with me, but smiled sarcastically, because she prefers it over frowning.

I know she was angry because I was right.

I sense a great loss, a great frustration with my mother. She at times needs someone, so badly, but is terrified of everyone. Even more of me, because I’d raped her, and fears my father as well, simply because he is a man. This fear grips her, and I can feel it. She can’t lie about how strongly it eats away at her, not to me. And I’m all the more frightening for it.

The first time was not long after I’d met her. Days after I told her I loved her.

She went to some sort of game with a boy she didn’t much know. He was so sad; she explained to me later, I wanted to make him smile. So fucking stupid. And that bastard pinned her to a fucking fence and took his time to run his hands over her body, cupping her ass, grabbing her breasts, sneering at her, even as he fucking reached down and let his fingers smooth down the zipper of her jeans.

And without a body there all I could do was stand beside my father and watch.

I watched my mother start to fray.

She still smiles. Because she prefers to. But I can hear her screaming, and I’ll scream with her. Sometimes she just can take it.

And she smiles, winks, laughs. She’ll smile at you while she shoves her hands in her pockets so you won’t see them shake.

It happened again, a time she couldn’t take. She was working, some horrible repetitive business with toothless babbling fucks. She was on her knees; I was at her side, arguing with her about something unimportant, when I felt her shiver. We both looked up at the same time, capturing two men at the end of the isle, as they captured her with a simple motion. A man laughed, looked down at her on her knees, and snapped a belt he held in her hands.

Go away! I screamed at him. Go away! Get away from her!

Shush, my mother told me, as if they could hear me, like I could do a fucking thing, they’re customers.

They’re torturing you!

They can’t tell.

The started to circle around, walking around her isle. My mother smiled as they passed but I felt her closing, the isles bent in, she was suffocating.

They can, I defended, I was one of those men. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Can I help you, she asked, ignoring me.

One gave her a little smile, a sneer as she pointed the way to a location.

And they were gone.

But not to her.

She felt them on her back, she felt trapped, closed in. My mother walked back into another room, where no one would see her, and collapsed. Inside her she felt them standing at the door. Then they were closer, just watching, laughing between themselves, the belt swinging from a hand.

She felt one grab her wrist and leaned lower on herself so she wouldn’t moan aloud.

My mother was alone in that room. But the panic all happened in her head.

Mother. Are you all right?

She asked me to leave. My voice was frightening her, at least for that time. I couldn’t defend her. And I couldn’t comfort her. Not me. Not someone like me.

My mother is in love with a human boy. No, more of a man than a boy. Maybe not by age, but his mind is.

My mother gives him my story to read. And I can’t help but wonder what he does with this frustration. When he’ll know what’s happening to her still.

He is also too far away to help her. Far enough so he can’t even see her. Maybe its better that he can’t see the fray.

Maybe fucking bullshit.

Keta often made me soups, when I was allowed to eat. Those meals were both a privilege and a punishment. He always did that. Treat me and beat me at the same time. Move his hands from my throat just so he could grab something to cut into my skin with. A smile, and pain. A laugh, a punch.

And then, he’d try to kill me.

For only a little bit, so close. And he’d let me go. He’d let me live. Treat and punishment.

Are you hungry? I was lying on my back, upside down on the bed, so I faced the door. My head was tilted up so that I only had to open my eyes to see him, while my hands rested long numb under my back. I’d stayed just the way Keta had left me.

Why? Because I was servant? Because I feared him? More like I was afraid to move. I thought I’d break if I did. Hell, I was eight years old.

Nothing was happening clearly.

Are you hungry? And I opened my eyes.

I’m fairly certain I pissed myself. Another man was standing next to my brother. Shame struck me harder than my brother was ever able to, but it was still pain he caused, still his blow.

I froze.

The other man was older than him, in his thirties or forties. He didn’t look directly at me, at least, not at my face. He was looking at my legs, my blistered and twisted skin. He stepped into the room past Keta, up to the bed pad, and I held my breathe, or I thought I was, but as I look back at it now I see his image covered and uncovered by my heaving chest.

Keta was on him in an instant.

This thing is not for sale, he snapped. I still hadn’t moved. Keta didn’t look at me, as neither did the man, but he reached down, and set a hot bowl of soup at my hip. Clear silvery yellow, with small stringy plants floating just under the surface. It burned my skin, but I only tightened my muscles, afraid to knock it aside.

My brother spoke again, this time in a language I didn’t understand, as if repeating his previous statement. The old man seemed to take no offence, but shuffled his feet in an unsteady almost hapless way. Like his legs were bad.

I was afraid he would fall on me.

But my brother shouted at him, and his drunk old head snapped up, and they left the room, my brother arguing with the old man who never answered him back.

I took great time pulling my left hand from beneath myself. It was dead weight, and I knew if I simply yanked it free the bowl would fall from the wrinkled bed pad and splash down on the floor amid the glass. There I rested it on the glass that had slipped back out of my skin on the pad, waiting for feeling to come back. It wasn’t.

I started to roll, trying to simply lean into it and scoop it up somehow, but the soup tottered. I froze, not daring to move back either way. From here this pinched a bit of glass in the small side of my hip, a tighter and tighter burn. I left it. Soup or pain. Food or torture.

Kill me, I muttered at the soup, even though it stretched and pulled at the cuts the glass had made at the corners of my mouth, but I’ll have you. You I will swallow.

The soup almost shivered, but it was probably only my trembling. Maybe. But in those days I saw all sorts of things, and sometimes still do that I can’t seem to convince myself aren’t there.

I lifted my hand and tried to flex my fingers, still no response.

Frustrated, I started to wave it back and forth over my face, a little self-abuse for motivation. Not that I needed any. I hadn’t eaten a thing in two days, which is only a short amount of time, unless you’re an eight-year-old boy. My stomach had been punched, twisted, sickened, and at the surface, splattered with my brother’s fluid, but I wanted that food. I’d die for it.

So much so, I didn’t even notice my brother return.

He was at my side before I saw him, and stole the bowl right off from my side. From over me he tipped the edge, so that it splattered down on my empty stomach, down over my sides, until every last drop was gone and wasted.

He did all of this without a word or expression, but as he finished he looked me over, and without warning, doubled over with laughter.

He had a remarkable face, a smile that almost looked honest so long as his eyes were closed, and that laugh that sounded, as mine should have.

Hungry? He taunted. Keta leaned down, kissing my cheeks. As he pulled back he lay the empty bowl over my face, and left the room again.

The first time I ever spoke to my wife, Asu, was when she was calling for my mother. She at first simply didn’t recognize the differences between our voices (I sound something like my mother with a head cold and a particularly bad attitude) so she asked me, or her as she thought, how a fight between her and my ex-wife was going.

I responded, this isn’t who you think it is.

My wife-to-be went quiet for a few seconds then responded, with a bit of nervous apprehension in her voice, oh, my bad. Good luck. And hung up.

She told me later she could never get my voice out of her head after that.

I never told her I couldn’t get hers out of mine either.

And I still look back at that memory to this day.

I met her in person only a few days later. I looked down at her coldly from atop a set of stairs as she came up, all on purpose. She flashed a half assed nervous smile.

Here, she said, handing me a small plastic bag, this is for your mother.

I thanked her, turned away, and shut the door.

The second time I talked to her in person it was a bit of a crude joke from my mother to get back at her. Crude, because they were in the shower. But hell, I joined in.

I leaned in towards her in the dark (in my culture it’s not uncommon to bathe with one another, but only my mother showers and bathes in the dark) and commented, I wonder how easily you scare.

I’m not sure if she recognized me at first, more due to the fact that she didn’t hear what I was saying over the water than anything else. I had to repeat myself twice before she understood, but she’d already figured out who I was by then.

Now she can tell my mother and I apart by simply looking at us. I don’t understand it. I’m in my mother’s skin. Physically, we appear one and the same. But Asu can pick me out no matter how well I mimic my mother.

This is one thing about my wife I love more than anything else. I feel something I can’t explain when she gets that sly smile that means she identified me. Gods, how I love her looks.

I’ve never been much for physical contact, unless I’m having sex. And I’m fairly black and white. I don’t like to brush against people in crowds, to shake hands, to have a hand rested on my shoulder, or foot on my knee. And unless I want you, I won’t touch you either.

But there are exceptions to the rule. Politeness or taunting.

I’ve kissed cheeks and shook hands. But only for brief instances. The same rule applied to my wife when I first meet her. She would walk with me, up and down her street so that we could simply speak. At the beginning it was awkward.

Um, how old are you? This was one of the first questions my wife ever asked me. I answered it twice, because the water in the shower was too loud. I’m sure it didn’t help that I’d hunkered down to one edge of the tub, sure that we wouldn’t touch.

Nineteen, I replied.

Oh?

A moment of silence, penetrated by the steady stream of water.

Something was happening in the back of my head, but I kept it to myself.

I’m seventeen.

My mother told me, I told her.

Did she?

Yes.

In time the discussions got better. We discussed cars, which I despise, and the differences in her plane, compared to mine.

So, what color is the sky?

Blue, I replied, with a bit of a cynical tone, during the day at least. She made a slight face. Are you disappointed?

She laughed. I was just hoping it would be really cool, you know?

I shrugged. The trees grow upside down, though, I replied very seriously.

Really? Her eyes got a bit bigger and she leaned towards me. I couldn’t help it, I laughed out loud. Hey, what’s so funny?

You thought I was serious?

Huh?

I laughed more.

I touched my wife for the first time sitting outside her house, reclined beside her on her porch. Casually, I reached out, grabbed her wrist, and flipped her hand over so I could look at in my palm. As I cradled her hand in my lap she asked me what I was doing.

Looking at your hand, I mumbled, or in other words, it’s a cheap attempt to touch you.

And she laughed. My wife is always laughing at me. I had been quite serious. I gave her an annoyed glace, but I’ll admit I didn’t let go of her hand right away.

In all the years I’d raped woman and made love to some if they were accepting and I wasn’t in the mood to hurt anyone, I’d never kissed one across her lips. It is not an expression I have ever used lightly.

Besides my adoptive mother, who was a woman I was then in love with, the only who’d ever pressed their lips to mine was Keta.

Love wasn’t an easy idea. The first time I felt it I tried to kill the woman, my mother. When I admitted my feelings to her I’d done it accidentally, and out of anger and frustration, smacked her as soon as I’d said it and stormed out of her house.

So to do it one more time, to feel love and admit it, was torture.

I was seated on Asu’s couch, my head backwards over the armrest, an arm over my face.

Asu was nearly between my legs, which I was trying desperately to ignore, on her stomach. She was talking to me.

Somehow she always knew.

It’s all right to feel one way or another. You don’t have to be embarrassed all the time. This was an ongoing conversation, not out of the blue, so she may never have realized she was speaking right into my heart.

You know, it’s okay to be the way you are.

I’m not sure if she saw it, but I felt my mouth open, just a bit. I was trying to breathe. My heart was beating heavier, a thick steady motion, just a bit faster than usual, and everything was tightening. As she finished her sentence, I felt like I’d fallen off the couch.

Hey, I said, sitting up. Sit up a bit.

And I leaned down, awkwardly and even uncomfortably, and kissed my wife for the first time.

And I remember that moment exactly. Kiss.

A greatest treasure.