Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 14:08:54 EDT
From: Parsifal
Subject: The Naked Boy

The boy was 11, tall for his age, painfully thin, with a shock of black
hair that he kept pushing out of his eyes.  He was home alone, parents at
work at their store, brothers out with friends.

Home was a second-floor tenement flat whose front room overlooked the
street, crowded with children on this hot July day.  Boys were playing
stick ball and some girls were jumping rope chanting to the rhythm of the
footfalls.  Shouting, laughter, car horns, mothers calling children, but he
was not a part of them.  He was alone, and in his loneliness slipped out of
his T-shirt and summer shorts, which he had put on that morning without
underwear.  He stood nude and ran his hands over his ribbed chest and small
rounded buttocks.  His pubic hair was black but still sparse.

He walked from the bedroom he shared with one of his brothers into that
front room, which served as his parents' bedroom.  He stood outside himself
and watched this sad-eyed naked boy stare out the window.  He then climbed
onto the sill and stood spread eagle, displaying his nakedness to anyone
who might chance to look up.  He dreaded being seen but he needed to be
seen.  After a few moments, his breath catching, he climbed down and lay on
his father's bed, rubbing his small stiff penis and crying.

He couldn't be sure that anyone had noticed.  What if someone had seen him?
What is someone had not?

That evening, still warm as the concrete city gave back the heat of the
day, he walked the darkened streets, into the school yard.  In the deep
shadows of the building, he dropped his shorts and began to pee, listening
with fascination to the splattering sound of water on pavement.  He slipped
out of the shorts and wearing nothing but sandals and a T-shirt, he moved
into the light of a street lamp.  Could someone see him?  His heart beat
with excitement.  He needed it, to be seen, the excruciating pleasure of
the risk.

Out of the school shadows stepped a man.  He must have been there when the
boy had first arrived, when he had peed.  The boy felt his penis stiffen.
The man said nothing, but took him by the hand and led him back into the
shadows.  The man kneeled in front of him and putting his hands on the
boy's buttocks, gently pulled him toward him until he had the boy's penis
in his mouth.  The man continued to massage the buttocks gently, and the
boy felt a strange and forbidden pleasure.

The man let him go, then, after kissing him on the forehead.  The boy put
on his shorts and walked away, and then ran home, his heart bursting.  It
was his secret now, his private secret, his discovery, his pain and his
joy.  He had known kindness for the first time in his young life and would
never forget.