When ____________ Collide...

All Mark could hear was the whir of the DVD player through the images on the TV meeting his eyes, which couldn't blink if he'd used his fingers to pull them shut.

"What the fuck?"

He looked at Danny, the boy's cheeks soaked with tears, and opened his mouth, but his tongue - dry and shriveled with embarrassment - refused to do his bidding.

"I can't fucking do this with you," said Danny, and he walked to the door, stopping in front of Mark. "Why?"

"Why?"

"Yeah-"

"Why were you going through my stuff?"

"Your stuff? You said everything of yours was mine. And mine, yours. I was just trying to find a movie to watch. But I found-" Danny pointed to the TV, on the screen of which featured another in a long line of the Cedarville Niggers ramming his dick into Mark's hungry asshole. "And you fucking videotaped it?"

Mark lowered his head and thought he heard his heart regain a semblance of its former self through his chest. His ability to breathe returned as a squirt of saliva welled on his tongue. "I'm sorry," he said, "it won't happen again."

"Again?"

"That was so long ago-"

"It could've been last week for all I know." Danny sighed. So hard that Mark could smell the sweetness of his own cock on the boy's breath. "No wonder they fucking do everything you say-"

Danny took a step forward and was met by Mark's bony hand on his pointy shoulder. "Don't leave," said Mark. "I love you-"

"I can't do this." And Danny jerked his shoulder away and made for the stairs.

Mark watched a few more seconds of his finest day as the only white member of the Cedarville Niggers through puffing eyes that drained all the water and blood from the rest of his body, leaving it numb and useless. Until he heard the front door slam. At which he turned and bounded down the stairs in two oblivious leaps. As he opened the door, he pulled up at the sound of metal eating flesh and bone.

He ran to Danny's body just under the front bumper of the old Bronco, the knees of his jeans tearing on the stained pavement as he propped the boy's head in his lap. Putting his ear to Danny's mouth, he could feel its impending cold, could hear every word the boy had ever uttered, every word that he'd never get to say. Rocking back and forth, he looked into the stone face of the person he'd loved the most in his life, and deposited the first tear he could remember in months into the ceramic eyes that wouldn't blink no matter how hard he wished for them to do so.

Wait.

Don't go.

Wait.

Can I? Can I have another hour?

Can I? Can I have another minute?

Can I? Can I have another second?

Wait.

Come back.

Wait.

"Hey!"

Mark looked up, and through the spiderwebbed windshield could see his mother's ex-boyfriend.

Dan stuck his head out the driver's side window. "You two faggots get out of my way before I kick your asses-"

Mark laid Danny's swelling head on the pavement softly and got up, making straight for the driver's side of the Bronco. As Dan began to open the door, Mark slammed it shut with a kick of his bloody shoe, then reached into the cab of the truck, weaving his fingers through the thinned white hairs on the back of the old man's head. With a familiar calm that freed all the strength he could muster, he introduced Dan's forehead to the windshield a second time. Then a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And countless more times, each thrust more powerful than the last, until he could no longer tell what was glass and what was Dan's face.

With a sigh that deflated his entire being and let loose a cacophony of tears that lapped at his chin, he returned to Danny's body, a hardening mass of bone, muscle, vein, and tendon, and fell in a sobbing heap to the asphalt beside him.