Most of the people I know are women except for the snake and me, we are boys. A small boy, Mama K said, he’s small for his age so we can get rid of Rudy’s friggin shirts. Which we didn’t. When my age was five I stopped nursing. When my age was six I climbed the tree and shook the acorns down onto the blue tarp. When my age was seven the yellow bus rumbled by on the road each day, passed right by the bottom of our driveway, but I didn’t get on it. The thing about me that isn’t like other kids at the IGA or the gas station or down along the road is that I am the only male in the vicinity and I have an extra mom. And I have a Mean Aunt who isn’t fun or anything my Mama K says she’s bitchy and she knows everything. They aren’t like a lot of people but they are mine. My women are always working and I am always working.

This is what we do, me and my women. We hunt in the woods. We gather plants. We fry grubs in a skillet. We roll the dice. We know how to fight. We drill our reflexes. We practice lying down on the ground and then getting up really fast. We practice throwing spears and shooting arrows into bales of straw. Sometimes we get really hungry and then we make a big stew that is dark green and then we get our bellies full of iron my Mean Aunt says. When it is time to kill the ducks, we kill them and eat them, even the extremely cute one named Brownie Starlight. I named him that. We don’t cry.

In the evenings in the summer and also when it rains and also when it snows I build a fire that my Mama K showed me how to build log-cabin-style, little stuff then medium stuff then big stuff then the bow drill. I blow on it so the Smoke Witch dies and the Fire Fairy comes out, and then we sit with our stew and Mama K asks for my report and then she whittles with her sheep-killing knife and I demonstrate everything I know how to do: bowline, klemheist, one-handed push-up, pickle a bean, cure a potato, process a hickory nut, four-strand braid.