Wild packs of eleven-year-old street punks would hunt me down after school, preying on my subpar reflexes and total lack of athleticism. They had rough-and-tumble names like Ramrod and One-Eyed John and Razor Frank and Steve, and they were armed with steel-plated Trapper Keepers and frozen Fruit Roll-Ups sharpened into shivs. Fifth graders can be tough little assholes in the East Bay.

I always ran. Always! Just like Mama and Papa said. But the punks would catch me in all my cuteness and innocence, and they’d hold me down and beat me to a quivering pulp. And I’d be crying and sobbing, this helpless, defenseless little ten-year-old boy, and—

—shit, hold on, I have to clear my masculine gravelly throat—

AHEM. AHHHHHHHEM-HEM.

—sorry, these are some hard-hitting First Dimensional memories. I’m getting fucking emotional here. Don’t want any of my massive, superior tears to short-circuit this advanced experimental Dell Inspiron with twelfth-generation Intel® Core™ processor and WordPerfect 5.1 emulator I do all my word processing on—

AHEM!

—okay, cool—

And so then I’d whisper, “I don’t understand… Why are you doing this to me?”

Then they’d laugh.

“Because you exist,” they’d say. “And your body is puny and your voice is squeaky and your jaw is soft. And okay, we’ll be honest, we’re also totally jealous of the waterfall of glorious hair cascading down your shoulders. We wish we had hair like that, so we beat you.”

Even at that age, my mullet was astonishing, and the Pert Plus 2-in-1 shampoo-and-conditioner I’d just started using left it supple and gleaming like black steel, so I couldn’t really fault them on that one.

They’d finish bludgeoning me, and I’d scrape myself off the pavement and limp home. My mom and dad would find me battered and bruised and bloody.

“Well,” Mama and Papa would say, “just be satisfied knowing that you’re the better person.”

What…

A load…

Of BULLSHIT.

These punks were kicking my ass! Like, literally, this kid, I think it was Steve, he was always the meanest—he kicked me in the ass so hard this one time that his foot actually got wedged between my butt cheeks. Like it got stuck there for a solid three seconds. I thought I was gonna need the Jaws of Life to get this tool’s Reebok out of my butt.

Shit still pisses me off. Even now.

Then one day, the pack of hoodlums came after me again. Again I ran.

But this time, as they were chasing me down the street, I saw an alleyway I’d never seen before. I ducked into it at the last second.

It was long, dark, and winding. So long, dark, and winding it felt like it would never, ever end, its shadows black and dripping and thick like tainted blood.