The silky smooth skin of paper. I etched fifty mathematical equations in its hide when I was seven. The scratch of graphite would paint the room in static, a sort of gnawing hum that’d carve my stomach hollow. 

He had pitted olive eyes. Eyes that I could never see the center of. Machinelike eyes that'd whir and spin.

I had pitted olive eyes too. A pitted olive mouth. Pitted olive ears. To write was to slit my own skin. 

What is your name?

Louis from Liu. 

Who are you?

A mechanist’s son.

I didn’t speak then. Recitals of a program written by my father can’t be called that. 

It was then that my thoughts were scruffily folded beneath the dinner table, to speak like the numbers I scrawled and to be far secluded behind mile thick glass. 

My voice would sometimes croak. Groan as if it was muttering some imperceptible gibberish. I think it was then too where the gnawing hum began to become a roar.

Then too when Mrs. Eddy asked,

Who are you?

And it was my fingers who answered.

I don’t know if I scribbled out hieroglyphics or if I carved out a mount Everest made of graphite. What I do know is that the black dust painted my palms in lawless strokes at the end of it all, and my arms were no longer riddled with the crimson ink of paper cuts.