Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez

consistently secreting a small trickle of urine and a thin, smelly excremental leakage.
    This, of course, deterred Gramma nothing. She had faith it would live. She found a small portrait of “Burning Heart” Jesus, the one where he looks you straight in the eye while holding his own heart in his hands, engulfed in flame—you remember the one—and she put it over the piglet’s head, then told me to pray with all my might, to squeeze my eyes shut and put all my faith into Jesus’s healing power, and that if I prayed hard enough, the piglet would get better. Just you wait and see. Pray your little fucking heart out, she said to me in Spanish, and it will live.
    Of course, I had no idea what the hell she was talking about, as a toddler (or a ten-year-old) when she went on and on about her fé , (“faith”), but I knew to repeat whatever she said, when she was praying, so I did, and after she left, I kept praying to Jesus in a long, uninterrupted conversation about how well I’d treat the piggy if it got better, how I’d feed it and hold it and take it home with me so it could sleep in the bed with me and Mom and Dad (either as a toddler, or ten-year-old) and I fell asleep after a while, with that list of what I’d compromise in exchange for the piglet to live growing and growing in that stifling oversize closet Grampa had used for an office. It was really just a catchall windowless room of greasy truck parts, oil cans, half-working tools, unbreathable air, and now, a dying piglet.
    I woke up sweating a few hours later, with the sweet acrid smell of poop in the room, sugary and innocent, the faultless excretions of newborns that will not provoke revulsion.
    The room was still, so hot that even the molecules had stopped moving because they were afraid of heat exhaustion.
    I pulled back the cover slowly to see how the piglet was doing and saw that it was no longer breathing. Its tiny nether region had swollen, looked purple and watery to the touch, and since it wasn’t even leaking pee anymore, I knew that it was finally dead.
    I started praying again, hard as I could, and whimpering, begging Jesus to undo it, to bring it back, and Gramma heard me from the next room, came in to see how effective the power of Jesus had been—and I think she had actually expected the pig to recover, because we’d called in her faith card, and she was also sincerely disappointed to find out that the piglet had expired that afternoon. “Why didn’t Jesus save him?” I asked her, through my tears.
    â€œIt’s not Jesus’s fault,” she said to me. “God had other plans for him,” she intoned, repeating a hollow stock answer from the church, as she’d heard told to her many times before. I was thinking, What sort of plans? Make him into tiny tamales?
    â€œNo, that doesn’t sound right,” I said. “We asked for his help. We prayed to Jesus. If Jesus can’t help, why don’t we pray to God instead?” Why go through the overburdened hippie public defender when you can talk to the judge directly?
    Â¡Aye, mijo! she yelled, genuinely frightened, “Don’t talk like that!” She crossed herself. I forget the Spanish word for heresy, or if Gramma even knew what it meant, but she stopped short of leveling the charge, putting on her auto da fé headdress. I don’t think she ever trusted me fully again, after that comment, because of my natural Lutheran sensibility, outminding her Catholic chain of command.
    Anyhow, I cried for that pig. And I never forgot that smell, in that room, either, and I still get fleeting phantom instances of it a few times every year, when I’m in some deep introspection, thinking back down that far, picking at the wounds, under the armor.
    And I never prayed like that again, until the night we thought my little brother Derek died (you’ll meet him later). It wasn’t until some point around