This kid, he thinks that he loves a girl in his class. He is very protective about information pertaining to their relationship, and rightfully so I suspect. Once, not long after I had been asking too many questions about it, he drew a picture of them sitting together on a park swing smack dab in the middle of the most magnificent ray of sunshine you ever saw. It was the angle he chose that told most of the story. He drew it as if the observer were watching secretly from behind. It reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting. I asked him why he chose the perspective. He didn't answer right away. He tucked his chin down close to his shoulder and looked over the picture. He curled the toes on his foot and swept it slowly back and forth across the shag carpet. He raised a finger to his lips and touched them gently.

"I don't know," he said, then walked to the corner of the room and began playing with a bag of marbles.

I stopped asking questions at that point. I knew why he did it, and I suddenly remembered things about my own youth. I remembered believing that it was impossible for big people to understand how hard it was to love. I felt right and I felt wrong all the same. Love is everything and love is trouble. He is six years old by the way.

So on Tuesday I watched him work for a while. I watched his lips purse in and out as he focused all of his attention into staying between the lines he had created. He raised his eyebrows, and then squinted as if moving the crayon with his face. I noticed that nothing seemed to penetrate his conscience, diverting him from the task at hand. The television was loud and his mother talked on the phone.

I was dreamy, tired from work, and a bit stoned. Before long my hand found my scrotum, and my attention had migrated to Christian Amanpore, live from Jerusalem. It's hard to explain those moments when I have left work or some place that I hate, found my way home, and find myself strangely retarded upon facing the world that thrives behind the front door of my very own home. Things happen and I say, "Oh shit," or, "I really don't know," and not much else. I feel sucked into the couch and mentally fragile. There are expectations that are always persistent, unspoken needs that I feel but can't act upon. There is stuff, both regular and out of the ordinary, and all of it is shocking. I question my motives. I question my authenticity, and I wonder whether or not I had anything to do with the forces that molded my surroundings. I wonder whether I am right or if I am always wrong. Then I see my son watching my example of nothing, and I sit up. My hallucinations leave through a wicked shiver down the spine. Usually about that moment, I realize that it is 6:00 p.m. and that someone needs to do something about dinner. But slowly as I am thinking about that, the cycle begins again and I am left wondering when I started scolding myself, or whether the process really ever stopped at all.

Suddenly I heard a noise, the sound of glass scraping against metal. It was an unusual sound. It was the sound of something wrong happening. My son was removing the glass panes from a standing pewter frame we had gotten as gift for Christmas. There were three frames in total, and he was already working on the second before we noticed. He was pulling out the generic prints of children that had been provided by the manufacturer. He had tossed one aside and was holding another, looking at it curiously. His mother, who had been sitting beside me all the while, sat forward and scolded him, "Don't do that. That is glass and that is not a toy."

"It's just nothing Mom. I'm taking out the fake pictures," he said.

"Honey those aren't fake," she said.

He wrinkled one eye and looked at her. I thought that perhaps he was about to say something like, "Duh," and stick out his tongue.

"Those are my other children," she said, "I didn't tell you?"

"What?" His face held an odd expression, one of blurry anger and confusion.

"Oh I didn't tell you?" She asked.

"Tell me what?"

"Those are your brothers and sisters, but I had to get rid of them before you were born."

His expression didn't change, but seemed to expand, something like a face painted on an inflating balloon. I sat up, excited to join in the tease.

"They are not," he said, and crumpled the picture in his hand.

I leaned forward and looked at him, "We weren't sure when to tell you about this."

His head sunk, a retraction of trust that only a child has enough innocence to portray, and threw the picture under the coffee table.

"On no," she said, "Not Daniel! That's the only picture I have left of him."

The surface of his balloon face reddened. It swelled, it stretched, and his eyes filled with tears. It was the expression I had come to know as the realization that he had lost something seemingly irreplaceable.

"You're lying… Why are you teasing me?" He screamed. An eruption of tears followed.

We jumped from the couch and showered him in apologies. We explained that we were kidding, and that if we had realized how seriously he was going to take it we never would have done it. We reassured him that he was our one and only child. We squeezed him but he fought us. He refused to acknowledge us no matter what we asked him, even though we promised him all of the toys in the world if he would just talk. He cocooned himself in a quilt and peered at us through a small hole in the folds. His mother and I looked at each other in guilty disbelief. We shrugged not really knowing what else to do. I wanted to believe like everyone else that the passing of time would erode the pockets of hurt that had been created. I left the room to kill some time.

Up to that point I had only known a mild sickness of the soul. But that evening it grew sicker and sicker each time I tried to touch him and he reacted as though each of my fingers contained a bolt of electricity. I am left wondering about my own forgotten scars and when, if ever, he will give me a mouth again.