Kaleb

“I can, from the distance of years now, still think I’m hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“This was our last time all five in a room together. I could have risen; I believe they would have embraced me. Instead, I behaved like an animal. I tried to rip the skin from their faces, and when I couldn’t, I tried to rip the skin from my own. They held me down on the ground; I bucked and spat and screamed my throat raw. I cursed them: we were, all of us, sons of whores, mongrels, our mother fucked a beast. They held me, pinned. At first they defended themselves, cursed me, slapped my face, but the wilder I became, the more they retreated into their love for me. Each of them. I chased them down into that love and challenged it—you morons, you sick fucks, I bet you liked reading it, I bet it excited you. I let the spit fly, nostrils wide—my body spasmed in their grip. My voice spiraled up into coughing hysteria. I said and did animal, unforgivable things. What else, but to take me to the zoo?”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“The boys are sweeping off the truck,” she tells the father. He nods. Hear the way she says it, the boys, how quickly and fully the son in the tub is excluded from that designation; how badly the boy wishes to be out there with his brothers, doing as he is told. The mother sits down on the toilet and watches the father bathe their son. She holds the clothes on her lap. The son will not speak to her. She watches him, and she wants to tell him that he can put all his hate on her; she will take it all, if that’s what he needs her to do. Listen, really listen, and that’s what she is saying in her silence. The boy can’t help but hear.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“And me now. Look at me. See me there with them, in the snow—both inside and outside their understanding. See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent. They believed I would know a world larger than their own. They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud. Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals