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little brother’s face light up full of wonder. Above his face, Father’s face shows the opposite – the taste of bitter expectation.
    â€œCarsten, you missed it,” Ricky says.
    Father yells over Ricky, “I called the house sixty times. Where were you?”
    â€œI went for a walk,” I say to the window.
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œTo the park, down Southfield Street, and back home.”
    â€œHow long did it take you?”
    â€œThree hours.”
    â€œThree hours,” Father says like he does not believe me. “Did you call your girlfriend? Turn around and talk to me.”
    My lower body feels weighted with industrial concrete. I know I should not obey my father, but if I do not turn around Father will force me to turn around and my punishment will be harsher. I count to four.
    Footsteps run. A door slams downstairs. A different door opens somewhere else in the house. And like a tomcat to a kitten, Father snatches me up by the neck, out of bed, into the bathroom to be licked clean. I close my eyes to not remember my face in the mirror, when sleep comes. The jars rattle on the counter as my knees beat the paint-chipped cabinet doors. The slender bottle with the seahorse insignia rolls off the counter, and into a wicker wastebasket. Junior screams stop, however the torture continues. Father’s unclipped fingernails feel like blades as I try to free myself.
    â€œStop,” Junior screams.
    I stop, and the pain lessens. Father releases my neck. I hear a slapping sound, and then the bathroom door slams closed.
    On the other side, Junior bangs and yells, “you bitch.”
    Nails dig into my neck. The four-petaled faucet molds to Father’s all-powerful hand and twists into an accessory. His power, digging into my skin, dunks my head into the deep sink. The water turns pink, swirling and satisfied. Father’s hands that are trained to accentuate beauty always uncover ways to change us into strangers. At least underwater I cannot hear him scream.

Chapter 8
    T he oval-faced business owners at Ford City Mall in West Lawn hated when Father traveled far for photography jobs. Junior and his grubby-fingered friends would terrorize their shops, begging for handouts, or hollering as loud as they could because they could. We were their dizzying sons from the Horn of Africa, privileged, yet poor. My older brother instructed me to walk with at least five people between us at the mall. From afar, I studied my brother like a subject sitting in front of my camera and emulated the hostility he wore under plastic coolness.
    The day his friends agreed I acted like him, Junior forced me into a chokehold outside of the discount shoe store. I elbowed him in the gut and received thunderous applause from his howling friends. When Father returned from his two-week gig in Detroit, Junior told him I could take care of myself. Father agreed but slapped Junior for referring to me walaal instead of walaalo. The two long-voiced words are interchangeable as Kodak’s Tri-X film with another brand of black and white film – though only one of the words means blood brother. The other word could refer to a female sibling. From that day forward, each time Junior said brother in Somali and then my name, Father punched him. What confused our motherless lives even more was that I often used the word my brother and not my blood brother. Eventually, my older brother stopped speaking Somali, and the space between us thickened, becoming a language of its own. I started haunting my friend’s house near the South Loop.
    During an oppressive summer afternoon, my friend and I snuck into his older brother’s room to steal a kung fu movie. The number of posters with shirtless men and his sexualized comments should have revealed that my friend was testing my straightness. How could I acknowledge or suggest that the maleness of the models aroused my interest over the single buxom diva poster? My friend pushed