It wasn’t until he thought about the logistics of back-alley organ removal that he started to feel sick.
Lee closed his eyes and remembered his mother in her last summer, back when they lived in New Jersey.
Come here, Lee, she’d called from the backyard. Her words were airy, like she was afraid to startle him.
Lee had abandoned his TV show and stuck his head out the back door.
His mother was lying in the grass, covered in butterflies. She had orange slices in each hand, and as Lee drew closer, he saw that she’d covered her arms in something bright that reflected the sunlight. Maybe honey, or sugar water. She wore a blanket of monarch butterflies, one of them balanced on her nose, her eyes crossed to see it.
“Wow,” Lee said, drawing as close as he dared. He would scare them away. He scared everyone away. “How do they feel?”
“They tickle,” his mom said with a soft smile.
“They look like they want to eat you,” Lee said, only half joking. The butterflies were crawling across her with fevered intensity, their little antennae twitching and wings fluttering.
His mother laughed. “When they finish the honey, they’ll leave. They won’t eat me.”
But Lee could imagine it now—the butterflies gnawing holes in his mother like maggots devouring a corpse. And now the butterflies were men, hungry for parts of her.
Lee had seen enough. He carefully stacked the articles and placed them back in the drawer, pushed in his father’s chair, and locked the door behind him. He lingered in the hallway for a moment, feeling as empty as the house, all the air in the world blowing through him.
Even though his father was handsome, and kind, and well-spoken, everything Lee was not, inside they were exactly thesame: They wanted the truth, no matter how ugly. They craved it the way wolves craved wet flesh and hot blood and pain. They needed it, even when they knew it would hurt.
Lee would help his father find the truth, no matter what.
When Lee opened his eyes, the sky was moving.
He was nine, and his mother would only be alive three more years, though he didn’t know it at the time. All he knew then was that he’d woken in the back seat of a car that smelled like chemicals, streetlights flashing by in the window. He sat up and saw no other cars on the road, only his mother behind the wheel, her curls strangely blue under the city lights. She had a backpack beside her in the front seat, and there were duffel bags at Lee’s feet, all around him. The car wobbled, burdened by the extra weight.
“Where are we going?” Lee said.
“You’re not allowed to ask me that,” his mother said evenly. She turned a corner and the bags pressed against Lee, shifting in the back seat.
“I’m not?”
“No,” she said. “It breaks the rules of the game.”
Lee peered through the window, but he didn’t recognize any of the streets.
“How do I play the game?” he said, pressing a hand to the cold window.
“Do you remember when we talked about Egyptian mummies?” his mother said.
Lee nodded. “They pulled their brains out with a stick through their nose.”
“Yes, very good, Lee,” his mom said, her gaze flickering to his in the rearview mirror. “This is an Egyptian burial game.”
“Okay,” Lee said, now wide awake.
“You’re a pharaoh, and we’re going to put you in a pyramid,” she said.
“In a sarcophagus,” Lee said.
His mom nodded quickly. “Yes, in a sarcophagus in a big pyramid. But you have to lie down and be very still and quiet until we get there, or else your soul will leave your body.”
Immediately, Lee lay down on the seat, holding his breath.
“Do you understand, Lee?” his mom asked.
