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Childhood
by Paul Hostovsky

This is an imaginary story with real names in it.
Billy Most’s mother’s name was Myrna.
Myrna Most is a great name, and no one
was innocent, least of all Billy, whom we called

Toad. Maybe we’d have called him Mole
if we knew they were called moles. They speckled
his face and neck and made him look like a toad. In the end
I’m just a man looking to buy back his childhood

home. I press the doorbell gingerly. I come from
gum surgery. Gingivitis. Myrna is the realtor.
She walks me through the branching rooms, narrating.
I press the periodontal packing with my tongue,

and it resembles the flashing on the roof
in the angle where the roof meets the chimney
which is old and red and missing a few teeth.
The neighbor on the left was Mrs. Nad.

Toad called her Nag. I, too, disliked her.
But I was neutral in the turf war between
the sidewalk and the curb, where Nag had planted
sod, and tied some string on sticks around it

to keep us kids off it as we walked
to school and home. Toad trampled it
on purpose, kicked it up maliciously, goose-
stepping, heels digging in: oops, oops, oops,

the crescent divots flying up like commas
punctuating the blank air. All of a sudden Nag
comes hurtling down her front steps like
an exclamation point in an apron

and runs him through, and drags us both
by our ears over to my house (because Nag was a great
name and no one was innocent). But then she wavers,
as if wondering how to ring the bell with her hands full

of ears… Meanwhile Myrna recites certain details,
expunges certain others. I listen politely, tonguing
the wound in my head. And all of this feels like being
walked through my own body by a specialist,

a prostitute, say, with a very professional air
and expertise concerning this most intimate
part of me, where I haven’t set foot in years,
not since I moved away to a state with a name that

sounds like another country, Pennsylvania
or California. Suddenly Nag begins weeping.
She lets go of our ears, turns and walks
away. She seems to grow very old. She begins

picking up the divots one by one, like scalps
of her great, great grandparents murdered in their sleep
by Toad Indians. She piles them in her apron, kneels
on the sidewalk, fits them gingerly back into the earth.

This would be the perfect place to insert
an insight. Some lesson learned, some observation made
concerning friends and neighbors, life and death
and childhood. This would be the perfect place. Let us

pray. We kneel down beside her, to help her. Toad
returns to rake her leaves in the fall, shovels
her walk in winter. He buys a fleet of lawnmowers.
I move away to another country. Myrna Most

sells another house. The For Sale sign dangles
from the yellow stake in the mouth of my aching
front yard, a little cement in the hole. It’s early
April. I can’t believe what they’re asking. I make

an outrageous offer. I offer this poem.
Myrna recites the terms of this poem.
You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to believe it.
Take it or leave it. You can never walk away.