Love/Imperfect

Fellatio

Fellatio for another Harry “Fellatio—that’s cocksucking—,” he explained, “has only achieved popularity in recent years, when men habitually began to bathe. Before , our only choice was the unspeakable crime against nature.” I could feel him smiling against my chest. “Happily, we live in an age of redoubled possibilities.” It was ten days past his eighteenth birthday, but the first he had been free. When I saw him as I came off my shift at the mill, I felt a stab in my heart. Both for what would happen now and for what would happen later. It was a dithery helplessness—something a man should never feel. But Harry could make me into a girl that way, even if I always played the man. “The unspeakable crime does have its points, don’t you think?” He slithered his body next to mine. He was the snake in the Garden, as I had often told him. His tongue was in my ear. “Am I still your sissy now, my Paddy-Cake?” 170 · christopher t. leland And I, knowing what had to come, could only breathe, “You are always my sissy boy, Harry.” I am not a man who talks much. I am not a man who feels free. I am not a man who understands the world. I grew up in the fields, and that is not a happy place to be. Do not let people fool you. They speak of those lovely times in the country, but the country is hard and coarse and mean. It is dust and mud and drear. The country means a body sore from labor, day to week to year. It is bruises and cuts and broken bones, infection and tetanus and gangrene. It is a heedless sun and a mist that chills the marrow. It is work like work has been for centuries, with nothing changing. Times were hard, and so I had to leave. I was the second brother, after all. I crossed the sea. Not to America. To England. Perhaps I was lucky. I am a good worker. A good husband. A good provider. I am the father of five daughters, and I go to Mass. Though not every week. I was only a boy when I came, and I met Alice not much after. In the year or so before, you would think I had many adventures, but you would be wrong. I had little money. I had even less confidence. Harry said I must have been pretty then. Pretty. That is what he said. But there, alone and Irish, I did not feel pretty, even among the other Irish who were angry and sad and away from home and would cheat a countryman as quick as piss in the morning. That very first time, Harry said I was robust. And then he giggled. I had never known a man to giggle. fellatio · 171 My Alice had red hair, and I with my black hair loved redheads, and so we were married, and she would not mind me saying we had a fine time, the two of us, even after the first girls were born. Maybe we kept at it because we always wanted a boy. It is only now I thank God there were none. But Harry had the softest skin. Softer than Alice’s. It was some magic, silken thing, that skin. I felt rude and dirty against it, my rough hands and the stubble on my chin. But he always told me that it was those things about me that he loved. Oh, he was foolish—that Harry!—in the way only the rich can be. In Ireland, I did not know rich boys. When would a boy like me have had the chance? Perhaps he was just careless. I mean that the way it sounds, which is something Harry taught me—to think of what words say. Rich people, especially children of rich people, think they have no cares. So they are care-less. And it was certain when I met him that Harry seemed somebody so different from me and everyone I had ever known that I could not parse him. There in the underpass, the trains pounding overhead as my shift let out. I was late that night, having stayed to warn the next ones that the third loom could not be counted on. It was twilight, close to dark. And...