The Ones Who Got Away

When they cut his pants away to understand where the blood was coming from, the boy looked away, the lower lids of his eyes pushing up into his field of vision. They are forced to come to grips with the hideous realization that the inequities of childhood, its attendant suffering and imbalances of power, are relative, a socio-economic parallax that persists from birth to death. He sat on the pew outside his office and read them and then read them again: the DNA from the blood from the saliva from that first fingerbone matched the genetic workup of the bones themselves. His eyes are red around the rims. “Then what?” he finally says, for the second time.