The Brute Within

At the supermarket, I ask Papi to dress up in his big gorilla suit for my birthday party. No, Jesús, he says, it’ll just scare all your friends. But that’s what I want. Marcus will be there. He pantsed me in the cafeteria last week. Mamá cleans his house every Friday and invited him to the party. Later, at the party, we eat Twinkies on the back patio, a square slab of concrete with some folding chairs. Your house smells weird, Marcus says. Isn’t your dad a garbage man or something? The other boys chuckle. He’s a custodian, I say, but he’s going to be a doctor someday. Sure, Marcus says, and do you believe in Santa Claus, too? The boys laugh. I see Papi through the kitchen window standing at the sink. He winks at me. A few minutes later, a gorilla runs around the corner of the house and charges toward the patio. The boys shriek and scatter through the yard, and the gorilla growls and stomps and beats its chest and chases them until it scoops up a boy—Marcus. Marcus flails and cries, and a dark spot forms at the crotch of his khaki shorts. Papi pulls off his mask and we all gape at Marcus alone in the grass, a yellow line trickling down his leg. My chest feels like cement. All I can think about is how earlier that day in the check-out line, when a lady in front of us collapsed to the ground—a jar of pickles shattering on the black-and-white checkered floor—Papi pushed on her heart and blew into her mouth, and I just stood there—dazed, blank, lost, like some vile creature adrift in a cold and lonely cosmos, gripped by a burning in my belly, an all-consuming hunger for the suffering of a boy, and I hung my head toward a puddle of vinegar, holding a box of Twinkies.

Ahreeda Ryter is a "Best of the Net" nominee whose work has appeared in Epiphany Magazine, The New Territory, The Decadent Review, Panorama, Prism Review, The Bookends Review, Scribble Lit, Mystery Tribune, Revolute, The Roadrunner Review, Eleutheria, LAMP, and other places.