The men stand in tight pants on a grass rectangle. They are puffed up like confronted bears. Someone with sandy hair spiking out of the back of a plastic head covering yells, "Crank Houses of the Holy. That's my fucking jam." Someone else with the plastic head covering in his hands and hair tight to his head in braids says, "Nah, man. That's whiteboy shit," and the other men start laughing. Some of them double over like their midsections are hurting.

I'm on the ridge, but I can see and hear everything. Someone turns on music, and some of the men start bouncing. One throws the brown ball to another. They go back and forth like that. Then there's a shrill noise. They line up and start running their bodies into each other, hard and without mercy. Fall down. Get up. Fall down again.

Their mothers are at home, or in skirts or dresses and working for men, fingers crossed. But isn't that all of us: fingers crossed.

When the men walk across the asphalt and away from the green rectangle, they don't look wounded. They look covered in brilliant feathers. They are inflated and hovering. They are rough and delicate at the same time. All their anger and yearning has coalesced in their faces, which are, in the long-pole lights, glowing. We will have to trust them.

One of these men, let's say the one with the sandy hair, will learn from heavy books about the rules other men will enforce in wooden rooms. He'll delight in all the ways he can restrain us. He'll think back on the days when he ran his body into other bodies and loved the sheer fucking thrill of it, the idea that any one time could snap his neck, but he would have been in it, right, he would have been living.

When he's in a room with a girl, he'll pull her hair back like that, in that just-before-neck-snapping way. He'll tell her she likes it, but it won't matter if she does.

Later in life, he'll make his daughter feel like nothing without even knowing it. She'll be in hairbows, in the square of back yard with brick walls on all sides, or maybe running a race, and he'll be looking at the tree line, somewhere else altogether, and she'll watch his eyes, and that will be that.

When I see him when we are both old, he doesn't remember me. Let's say I'm the neck-snapped girl or the girl standing by the field in a coat too big for her and dirty or even one of the daughters. Of course, he looks through me.

"I did things," he might say to me when I hand him a sweet bubbly drink, because that is my job. "I used to... I had a career." His fingers flounder around the straw while his face freezes over with something; maybe it's melancholy. It doesn't matter. Get up.

.