The baby cow boy.

I told another lie, again.

There’s a boy out there with my mom’s big brown eyes and a watery lash line like a baby cow’s. Or they could be a dark blue-gray like new denim below thick furrowed eyebrows. His jeans were too big for him and they sagged from the weight of canned corn he’d keep in his pockets. Tattoos and piercings done with sewing needles when he was a teenager, and one big one he’d gotten in some 23 year old’s garage. It was a snake that went around his chin and opened its mouth as he opened his like one of those face paints you get at carnivals when you’re little. He was trying to cover up a birthmark on his face that was sort of shaped like florida.

This baby cow boy might be almost 29 now, stocky but small. He could have straight hair like my sister’s, long like mine, or maybe he buzzed it to keep from having to manage curls. My dad says his favorite color was gray, he was a leftie, he liked to play dice, he was allergic to dandelions and one of his ears folded over like a puppy’s. He’s probably grown now, but before he was twelve he had already almost died three times.

The first time was when he was six years old.

My family had taken the baby cow boy to Parma Pizza where everyone knew the pizza shop owner was sleeping with one of the old cheese delivery girls that delivered cheese from the cheese factory. After they got together, the owner let her get a job at Parma to keep her from having to drive the delivery truck around anymore. Three years later they were engaged and she was still one of the worst pizza chef’s in York Pennsylvania, a low bar. The pizza shop owner hadn’t known her ring size when he proposed to her and promised to replace it when he could but said in the meantime she should wear it on her thumb because at least it would fit and wouldn’t fall off. She refused to and said it fit fine on her ring finger and because how else was anyone supposed to know that it was an engagement ring if it wasn’t on the right finger. Everyone in the dining room could hear them arguing through the kitchen window. The pizzas were all late, and the baby cow boy was hungry. So hungry that not him, or anyone else, noticed something shining from beneath the melted cheese.

“Slow down, you're gonna choke,” my mom said, seconds before the baby cow boy stopped mid swallow.

He looked around briefly, not fully understanding the sensation of being incapable of taking a breath. He had been swimming before, but that had been a pressing feeling from the outside. Now, it was something pressing from within his throat. His eyes watered and reddened.

“Fuck, he’s choking,” she said, “He’s choking! Help him.” Gesturing at him, annoyed.

My dad stood up and picked up his tiny body, squeezing him from behind like how you see in the movies. He hadn’t done this before and didn’t know how. The baby cow boy’s eyes were going blank as he coughed and spit, half conscious and confused. After about five or so squeezes his head flung back and out flew chunks of food. They heard a bright little jingling noise as something metal hit the table, then rolled off and onto the red and white tiled floor. The old delivery girl ran over to it from where she had been watching the scene from behind a booth, and placed the little circle onto her thumb. It was her engagement ring.

…

“Mom, do you have any memories about him?” I asked. I was stooped down sitting on a small wooden stool beside the oven cleaning garlic cloves that I placed in a little blue bowl beside my mother. My mom was cooking while my dad stood behind her doing the dishes. Our kitchen was often crowded, with things, with people. It was a bright orange. My mom liked our home to be bright colors. She wouldn’t even let our appliances be gray. The washing machine and the fridge were white, the toaster oven was black, so was the stove. I could see my reflection on the side of the stove, rippled and distorted and gray.

“Mom doesn’t have any,” my dad responded for her. He shut off the sink and placed the plate he was rinsing into the dishwasher. “She doesn’t like to think about those things.”

“Can I ask her? Maybe she’s got something,” I said. We spoke as if she wasn’t in the room with us.

“She had gotten a tattoo,” my dad said. “After he ran away.” My mother placed a raw chicken tender into the pan, the searing sound and a strong smell of garlic and cajun and olive oil filled the kitchen almost instantly.

“Of what?”

“It was of him. We were pretty sure he wasn’t coming back at that point.”

“I didn’t know she had a tattoo.”

“She got it lasered off eventually. It was behind her right shoulder. She wanted him with her, but she didn’t want to see it all the time. She didn’t want that reminder all the time.” my dad said. “She misses him.”

…

The second time he almost died was when he was 8 years old.

When my parents were younger, they worked at a diner. Babysitters weren’t an option, and most other Greek families raised their babies in playpens in break rooms of restaurants. Someone’s yiayia would sit on a stool and rattle toys around to keep their grandbabies busy. The baby cow boy didn’t have a yiayia to keep him busy. He spent his time in the break room playing with GI Joes, or doing little jobs to help out in the kitchen, like cleaning garlics or cutting onions. Sometimes the cooks would let him use the meat slicer. He’d stand up on one of the orange milk crates, the machine was too high up for him to reach on his own, and he’d funnel in ham or cheese or lettuce. On breaks my mom or dad would bring him olives or pickle slices for him to eat until they had time to make him a good dinner.

On a busier day, my parents had forgotten to bring the baby cow boy something to eat, so he left the room to find something for himself. The baby cow boy went over and first checked the cooler. He ran his hand along the smooth stainless steel handles, pulling open each shiny fridge door one at a time. At home, pickles came in little glass jars, but in restaurants, pickles came in opaque five gallon buckets. He checked the shelves for containers he had been accustomed to seeing at home, passing over the gallon buckets. He closed the cooler doors.

He watched as people stepped inside a giant, cold room, opening the door and propping it up with a bucket or a milk crate. He felt the breeze touch his calves as the door swung shut. He pulled the door open. Standing beside it felt like letting the dogs out to pee in the winter while you’re still in your pajama shorts. But inside the room was dark, with one light in the corner that buzzed and shook slightly. Shelves filled with crates of food covered the walls, ice accumulating on their metal edges like stalactites. He could see his breath even before he stepped inside. As soon as he stepped forward the heavy door shut behind him. The last thing he saw before it closed was the orange milk crate he was supposed to prop the door open with. The light in the corner went off automatically, and the baby cow boy was left alone in the dark, in the cold.

Unable to see, the baby cow boy felt around for one of the shelves. He reached around for that familiar feeling of cold glass on his fingers, still looking for the pickles, dragging his hands across cardboard box after cardboard box. He stopped to breathe hot air into his palms. His fingers grew numb, his breathing slow and staggered. He curled up onto the ground, limbs shaking, eyes heavy. He could barely tell the difference between when his eyes were open and shut. He couldn’t stay awake. Eventually he passed out, the skin on his cheek falling onto a patch of ice so cold it burned.

Outside a customer ordered scallops. She had been thinking for a while, whether she wanted the scallops or not. She had thought maybe a cheeseburger, but maybe that’d be too greasy for her, and maybe she’d get heartburn, plus she wasn’t really feeling red meat anyways. She looked at the chicken tenders for a bit, deciding that she didn’t want to seem like a kid for ordering chicken tenders, even though that’s what she really wanted. Then she thought, well what’s a grown up sounding food, what’s sophisticated sounding? In a diner, there’s not a lot to choose from that’s sophisticated. She had never had scallops before, thought for a moment, then asked the server if they had any, secretly hoping they were out. When the server said yes, that solidified her answer out of embarrassment. That decision saved the life of the baby cow boy. The ticket was taken to the kitchen window, placed in the order queue, then the cook called for someone to get the scallops from the freezer.

“Jesus! I think there’s somebody in here!”

When the freezer door opened the baby cow boy was pulled out and shaken and rubbed and cuddled in a frantic attempt at heating him up. His hands were cold to the touch until they ran his fingers under the sink, warming the water up slowly as he gained feeling.

The woman got her order, picked at her food, figured out she didn’t like scallops, and left the diner still hungry. The baby cow boy was sent back to the break room with a plate full of pickles for my parents to finish their shift.

…

“I feel so awful because I was a bad father to him. We were just so young, you know?” My dad said. My mom was chopping onions and tomatoes for a Greek salad. Having finished my garlic cleaning, I moved my stool away from the oven, having felt one or two grease splatters fall onto my arms and forehead from the chicken being placed on the pan.

“Well, couldn’t you try to find him again now?” I asked. My dad was leaning down to organize the silverware in the dishwasher. Knives facing down.

“I’m not exactly sure if he’d want to be found,” My dad said.

“How would you know?”

“Because he knows where to find us if he wanted to,” He said.

My mom placed the bowl of salad on the table between my dad and I.

“When we had your sister, things really changed. We were older, we knew more,” he said, he lifted the bowl of salad and started walking it towards the dining room. “I don’t know if he’d resent us for being the parents to you guys, that he always wanted us to be for him.”

…

The third time he almost died was when he was 10.

The baby cow boy loved things that weren’t his. There were a couple of bikes on our block that didn’t belong to him. He loved bikes, too.

The baby cow boy brought a friend of his to steal the bikes and go do bike tricks. They created a ramp in an alleyway with a piece of plywood paneling and a couple cinder blocks.

“How high did I go?” The baby cow boy asked.

“What? You barely cleared anything,” his friend said.

The baby cow boy started further back and pedaled faster, gaining more air this time as he pushed off the ramp with his back tire.

“Now?” He asked.

“That was nothing!”

Again the baby cow boy furthered his starting point, pedaling faster and faster.

“That had to be good!” He said.

“Come on, man! Can’t you go any higher than that.”

The baby cow boy pedaled back ever farther, he pushed off, but right as his bike left the ramp, a car came around the corner and smashed into him. He flew nearly 15 feet in the air.

“How high was that one?” he said before passing out. The driver drove off without checking. His friend waited for him to wait before walking the mangled bikes back to where they found them and going home.

That night, my mom brought home submarine sandwiches for dinner.

“What’s with that?” My dad asked.

“With what?” The boy said.

“The sandwich.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“The way you’re eating it.”

“I’m not doing it weird or anything.”

“Yeah you are,” my mom said. “You’re a leftie.”

The baby cow boy had been eating his sandwich with his right hand. My dad poked the boy’s left elbow. The boy cried out. My dad poked it again to be sure.

“Get him to the hospital, Christ’s sake.” My mom yelled.

…

This boy isn’t real. My older sister is my only older sibling. The baby cow boy was actually a series of stories my dad made up. The character was named Pasquale and he was a cautionary tale for me and my siblings.

“Don’t eat so much ketchup, it's bad for you,”

“Why is it bad?”

“Pasquale almost drowned in ketchup once,”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he almost died,”

Pasquale was a constant part of our life, constantly on the brink of death, constantly in danger.

“I don’t know why you lie about this stuff,” my mom said. We were speaking on the phone about the piece I was writing for a nonfiction class. “You’d have some really good stories if you just told the truth. Think of all the crazy things that have actually happened to you.”

“I don’t really want to,” I said. “Plus it’s not a lie. The stories about Pasquale aren’t true, but they’re stories dad told us. It’s stuff I heard in real life, so technically still nonfiction in a way.” I shifted the phone to my other ear. Both hands on the keyboard. “It could be a piece about how my dad lied to me my whole life about having an older brother.”

“But did you even believe any of that stuff?” My mom asked.

“I didn’t believe anything dad said when I was little,” I said. “Remember when he told me about weasels and I just assumed they were a made up animal?”

“He just liked to tell stories.” She said.

“I loved his stories.”

“How old did you say your brother was?” My professor asked.

“He would be about 29 right now,” I said, holding in a laugh, “But I don’t really know, I’ve never met him.”

Almost every piece I had written in this class had been a lie. I had made it into a game at some point, to see how outrageous of a lie I could tell before someone called me out or someone stopped believing me. But they didn’t, nobody did.

“I thought for sure someone would say something about the little kid with the face tattoo,” I said. “How does anyone believe that?”

There had only ever been one short story I wrote in that class that was true. My professor asked me to read it out loud. I remember trying my best not to sound upset while I was reading. I could tell that my voice was shaking.

“They must think we’re crazy,” my mom said on the phone.

“Probably, yeah,” I said.