I pressed the edge of the stick against the stoop, turning it until it was sharp. It made a sound like teeth scraping. It made a small music. It was summer and I was waiting for the ice cream man, waiting for Danny and Joey who lived across the street. When the ice cream man came they would have money. They would be able to get whatever they wanted. My mother was at work at the welfare office. My mother was young. She worked all day. Danny and Joey lived on the other side of the block. Our block of brick and stone row houses, each with steps we called a stoop. I pressed the stick, a good stick I found when I walked to Prospect Park with my aunt, my sixteen year old aunt who held my hand and sang me Beatles and Stones songs. Sang me it’s a hard day’s night and I’ve been working like a dog, and sang me Ruby Tuesday, and once told me if I was thirsty to drink my spit. She took me to the park where the trees were tall and there were flowers, and there, lying on the grass, was the stick I needed, the kind of stick one could use as a cane. See Yaya. See how I can walk with it. And she didn’t take it from me. I walked home with that stick. I was a small boy on a street in Brooklyn, on first street off Seventh Avenue, and it was summer, and it was during a time of war, a time of fathers leaving, and Joey and Danny live across the street. I am waiting for the ice cream man. I am turning the stick over and over in my hands, a branch of oak, turning it so much against the edge of the step that the wood has gotten warm, that I can feel the wood warming when I stop and touch it with my fingertips. When I touch the tip to see how sharp. And it is becoming sharp. I do not remember how I knew to do this. But I did it. I found a stick, took it, and used it as a cane, a walking stick, when I walked with my aunt to the park and no one knew what I wanted the stick for. It was summer, in 1969, in Brooklyn, on first street, and there I sat, a child, with a stick half the size of his body, a boy. I was a boy with a stick that I was sharpening, into a spear, the way human boys had done for decades, for hundreds of years, for thousands of years, all the way back to the first child, who took a stick, a sharpened stick and jabbed it into the side, the warm side of another mammal, and then into the side of another human being. And there was I, in Brooklyn, a child, and as I sharpened the stick I felt something that to this day, decades later, I can still feel, a sort of power, of knowing what was about to happen and knowing that others did not know. But you know reader, you know. And then it was done. I had on only cut off blue jean shorts and on my feet were blue Keds sneakers. My hair was Irish gold, gold like the boy in the story my mother read to me, The Little Prince, the boy who crossed over. The boy who fell from the sky. My mother was at work. Was my aunt home? Yaya, where were you? It was a world where children could be let out to run. Did not need to be watched, even in Brooklyn. A world where boys returned in coffins unloaded from the planes, but I did not understand that. Or did I? And where was the ice cream man, the one who never had anything for me, for I did not have a dime and a nickel, or a quarter, not the way Danny and Joey did. Joey the Italian kid and Danny whose Greek mother spoke a bunch of funny sounds, his name the only name I understood her say. Both of them, whose mothers did not work, who always had the shiny coins, who always got the ice cream. But today I had something they did not have. I waited holding my sharpened stick. On my face I had taken the makeup from my mother’s drawer and drawn lines, red lines under my eyes, three lines. How did I know to do this? And there I sat on my stoop, waiting for the chimes, waiting for the ice cream man, the white truck, the Good Humor man. No, this time it was the ice man, the one that Danny and Joey would come running for, calling out icy icy icy icy. I was ready. All my planning. All my work. And I, such a small child. I stood up on my stoop. I knew soon they would sit on Danny’s steps and stare at me and point. I stood up and charged. Afterwards, all I could tell my aunt as she shook me asking why I did it, as I wept and Danny and Joey’s mothers screamed at me in words I did not understand, and the small trail of blood trickled from Danny and Joey’s legs, all I could say was them, them them, and show her the way that Danny and Joey would lick their ices and point at me and stick out their colored tongues.