Enormous at birth, both are now so slender that their rib cages are visible under their skin when they lift their shirts over their heads. I know everything about what is visible of their bone structure beneath the skin, and about the skin itself, the precise location of each beauty mark and when it arrived, and the scars and what caused them; I know in what direction the hair on their heads grows, and the way they smell at night and in the morning, and all the many faces they went through before the ones they each wear now. Naturally, I do. When the older one worries that he is too thin and weak, I tell him how my brother had been built the same way when he was young, until—without warning, like a storm come so suddenly that someone, somewhere, must have prayed for it—a change came over him. That the thinness is in their genes, the sticks for arms and narrow waist and ribs poking out, all of it written into their bodies like an ancient story, but that sooner or later the time will come when this smallness and thinness will be overwritten, subsumed by mass, and the boys they are now will disappear, buried inside the men they will become.

Your brother? he asks, trying to imagine it. My brother who he once, but only once, saw, in a moment of fury he failed to contain, push me across the room and threaten me with a fist.

The small one is still too young to long to fall in love. He is surrounded by love, and that is still enough for him. The older one has already begun to long for it, but his body hasn’t yet caught up with him. About this, he can still joke with me. For now, desire and the workings of the body are still subjects for humor, but as the months pass, something has begun to loom behind it, larger and larger. He is waiting for the changes he sees overtaking his friends and worries they will never come to him, that he will never desire the way the others do.