Recess, fourth grade:
“Why does Peter Pan fly?” Tommy asked. Pause. “You’d fly too, if you got hit in the peter with a pan!”
Laughter from the other students. Except Milo.
“You fag,” Tommy said. “That joke was funny.”
“It was actually a riddle,” Milo said.
Tommy pushed him down onto the ground and commenced punching him in the face. Their classmate Douglas cheered the loudest.
Four decades later, in traction after crashing his SUV, Douglas did not remember the beating, nor would he ever. (Good thing for his health insurance, by the way.) (He despised Obamacare—goddamn socialist medicine.)
Copyright © 2018 by David V. Matthews
