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face and Grish went right over to investigate and confiscate the unauthorized delicacy. That the odor failed to alert Grish came as no surprise to any of us, the stink of shit and fear was pervasive enough in Sanctuary that we simply ignored it.
    When they finally clashed over Bruce’s ill-gotten prize, it was like a grizzly and a weasel fighting. The weasel was slippery and elusive, quick enough to dodge most of the blows, but ultimately overcome by sheer brute strength.
    Grish’s leer was triumphant, almost ecstatic. He had engaged, conquered and relieved this small boy of one moment of unauthorized happiness, and he wanted to make sure everyone in the dorm saw it. But his smile suddenly faltered, there was something wrong that he could not quite comprehend. And in that one tiny moment of awkward indecision, Bruce struck.
    He swung up with his free arm, retrieved his phantomed prize and smashed it into Grish’s smile. The dorm exploded into riotous laughter as Grish vomited. When he gagged and inhaled the shit further into his nostrils, he puked again, emptying his stomach while simultaneously trying to extricate shit with his fingers. The dorm swam in hysteria, the boys curled over and fought for breath while Bruce danced around Grish in a silent torment of mime.
    When he finally recovered, he scooped Bruce wordlessly over his shoulder and stomped from the dorm. Bruce didn’t even fight; he just hung there, his green eyes filled with a comical relief, his face colored with the hue of acceptance, and his smile hinged easy with the knowledge that his only elixir from this hateful existence was death, which he had just purchased for himself. He knew it and I knew it, and there was nothing either one of us could have done to stop it.
    As many times as I had been there myself, it was easy for me to see him strapped into the Bug; the sole of his foot strapped bare on the harsh metal plate, sweat dripping from his brow, down his chest, from his small hairless buttocks.
    The rubber silencer would be crammed into his mouth to keep his screams from piercing his tormentor’s ears; the vents would pull the charred smell of his flesh from their nostrils, antiseptic would freshen the spot where his bowels had voided in his struggle to escape; and at the last, the very last, his small body, rank with the stench of misuse, would be whisked away by a green garbed drone to keep the stain of his existence from paining anyone’s eyes. All that for a cup of shit and a lifetime of reinforced self-worthlessness.
    No one there from Children’s Services to witness the silence deafening the room. No juvenile judge come to smell the hot vapors from his body. No parent to witness that last teardrop glisten before it fell and shattered on the floor. He went alone, like a dark dreamy shadow to stain heaven’s doorway and mock the god that answered.
    And me? I was left with the knowledge that I had showed him the cold dead tree that was his unreachable heart, the unending sky that was his endless rage, the frigid breeze that society had warped from his once tender soul.
    Me.
    I showed him that.
    It was my first attempt at suicide.
     

Chapter Five
June 1975
     
     
    My next solid memory was of awakening in a small cell with a hard metal bed. There was a bright orange steel door in front of me with a large Plexiglas window set into it. This was not Sanctuary. It was too quiet and it smelled different.
    It didn’t take but a minute for me to realize what had happened. They shot me up with dope and shipped me off somewhere, maybe to a darker hell. I didn’t know at this point.
    What I guessed was that an investigation had probably begun into Bruce’s death, he was a state ward after all. Grish would have disappeared and we all would have been shipped as far and as fast away as possible.
    But I had new terrors to worry about now. I rolled from the bed and posted myself in front of the window. There was nothing to see but a bigger cinder block