“Mama. Mama. Help me, Mama. I’m alone. I’m afraid. Mama.”

He is blonde. Dyed. He is black. Self-identified as. Father unknown, discounted. Skin’s dark enough, mother’s is too.

He is drunk.

He is standing on top of a table in the middle of a room. The table is ornate, but not old. It is expensive. The legs are carved with animals that cannot anatomically exist in this world. There is a tablecloth beneath his boots. Its red and white checks are stained with mud, stained brown and green and mauve from the flowers littering the grass outside that have fallen off the trees and get onto everyone’s shoes.

The music is loud. Louder than him. His lips move with his confession and his arms are stretched, pointing up, fingers touching the sky, he thinks, but it isn’t the sky. It is the ceiling. His nail catches on a splinter of paint and he pauses. He is shocked. The sky is falling.

The sky is falling.

He is bawling.