Eric LaRocca

it seems like I am somewhat hesitant, it’s merely because it feels like I’m holding a funeral for my former self – the person I was before I lived with integrity and honesty

After all, what exactly is a family, if not a brotherhood and sisterhood afflicted with the same terminal disease?

“what have you done today to deserve your eyes?”

At the end of each day, he used to ask me, “what have you done today to deserve your eyes?”

“What for?” she had asked, her hands hiding the smile beginning to thaw across her face.

“Something he ate,” the Carpino boy told her. “He bit into an apple with a sewing needle stuck inside.”

When you’re gay, you have the privilege of choosing your family.

Things have gotten worse since we last spoke.

I’d sooner swallow wet concrete than let him call me his or dare to call him mine.

I haven’t thought of him much since it first happened—since the night when I first pulled his teeth, plucked his fingernails, and organized them accordingly; as if they were broken remnants, artifacts in the museum of our love: a gallery of yellowing antiquity.

There were many things I imagined doing to him: cracking him open as if he were some expensive delicacy imported from a faraway land and gorging on his entrails until my stomach was fit to burst.