Young Mungo

by Douglas Stuart

It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.

There was nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman.

So many lives were happening only two miles away from his and they all seemed brighter than his own.

“Imagine all that fear and disappointment clogged up in there, and nobody stopped to ask him about it, to ask if he was happy in his life, if he was coping. None of the men could tell ye how they really felt, because if they did, they would weep, and this fuckin’ city is damp enough.”

“Ah’ve known you since ye were in nappies, and ah’ve known that selfish mother of yours even longer. If anybody should understand making excuses for the person they love, then it’s you two. Can ye no forgive me that?”

He allowed his thumbs to slowly creep up under James’s Fair Isle jumper and brush against the warm skin. It was a nothing that felt like an everything.

Mungo’s capacity for love frustrated her. His loving wasn’t selflessness; he simply couldn’t help it. Mo-Maw needed so little and he produced too much, so that it all seemed a horrible waste. It was a harvest no one had seeded, and it blossomed from a vine no one had tended. It should have withered years ago, like hers had, like Hamish’s had. Yet Mungo had all this love to give and it lay about him like ripened fruit and nobody bothered to gather it up.

He would orbit her for an eternity, even as she, and then he, broke into bits.