A Love Like Blood Read Free Page A

back while I fight with myself how to hold the stands. I struggle to carry them, cradled in my arms, for five feet and stop.
    From across the yard, Brett’s blond father says, “help him,” with a buttery tenderness that is unfamiliar to my ears.
    He waddles to the truck with two paint buckets in one hand and a toolbox in the other. Brett smirks as Father nods down at us and spits. I close my eyes before the pink goo splats on the ground. Father’s face is stone but pockmarked with resentment. The irony is that now he will bless Brett helping me out of respect for his father. Somali men refuse to shame other men to their face. The resentment in his face settles into blankness. Even without a mirror to verify it, I know my face is as blank as his. Brett’s face reverses back into his youth.
    Our bodies, ready for the job at hand, float up from the cobwebs. The purple leaves shake as they scrape my arm. Glancing over my shoulder, I step inside the warm living room and look in front of me and fixate on Brett’s body. Muscle fibers in his arms fill up with blood, showing off his veins. His veins twist like politics on his skin. Blood rushes between my legs as we lower the stands to the floor. The lines of his jeans are swollen with puberty and milk. I ask in secret with my hands to show me what is underneath. Turning my back to Brett, I adjust myself through my khakis and move it up into a less noticeable position. His face is a face that I know and do not know. Athletic, hirsute, strong-featured, and with large feet, he is every combination of the men featured in my non-porn porn collection. The videotapes, which are exercise workouts, are in the last place my father would rummage through, a satchel with an angel’s face printed on the front and back.
    With my back to Brett, I say, “It will probably take us all day to unload everything.”
    â€œCan I ask you something? How do you deal with your dad’s cruelness?”
    I start to respond, but the truth might frighten him. My second answer feels dishonest and borrowed. That is the difficulty with language, finding the purest way to describe emotions, without having the appearance of stealing rented words. But then again, he should be as terrified as I am. My father is capable of anything, even killing a child. Brett only knows his father, paint, hammers, wood, and the splinters in his hands.
    In my silence, Brett says, “You need to stand up to him.”
    I shake my head in agreement; however, I know the moment I fight my Father, will be the moment he pulverizes my body into a soupy pulp. Yes, I have wanted to say – curse word – you to him two hundred times today, but my brothers and I are not allowed to swear. Respectable Catholics cannot pollute God’s breath with disrespectful language, especially Black Cuban Catholics.
    â€œYou need to speak up for yourself.”
    â€œIt is not that simple. Your father is not Somali. If he were, you would understand.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t put up with his bullshit.”
    A soft rattling like ice shaking in a plastic cup startles me. The pain in my face forces my feet to take a small step to the right away from Brett. I take another step. Junior, my older brother and Father’s favorite son, tugs the dolly into the living room. Brett whispers something, but the words sound like gibberish. White bungee cords secure four boxes down to the dolly by its handle. My younger brother speed walks around Junior huffing, carrying two black-framed posters.
    â€œHere,” Ricky says, leaning the blown-up photographs forward for me to grab, and then he races up the stairs, pumping his arms up in the air.
    â€œWho is this?” Brett asks, pointing to the woman posed in the first poster.
    â€œMarian Anderson. Richard Avedon, my idol, shot this.”
    The black and white image has a gypsy-like quality. Strings of multi-shaded beads are around Marian’s neck. Her long,