Dona Nobis Pacem

I'm older now but I used to be a young boy and when I turned five my mother told me something that nothing I've been through yet has erased. She said Baby, honey, we love you and we're proud but you're big enough and strong enough and it's time that you moved out. So I packed up all my things, my teacup and my fairy wings and I took the next bus out of town. And some guy tried to beat me up for looking at his peg leg funny and yes he knocked out a couple teeth but they grew back in they always do.

Once I got to town I bought a full beard off a man's chin with the money I'd earned from the lumberyard back home. And that made me look a little older and people didn't give me such a hard time, especially when I squinted as I did. And before you ask yes I met a few birds but they were a little young for me and I told them so because they couldn't read yet and I wanted to be clear.

I stayed in a laundromat for awhile and slept in the dryers mostly because the washers made me awfully damp. By that time all my clothes had worn to shreds so I made new ones out of single socks but once the manager found out she made me leave. I had a lot of friends though, and we had some good times since Toby was six and knew how to drive. All the rivers in town are paved and Toby drove this golf cart he borrowed down the sides and across and up through eight feet of water and that was how we bathed, once a year or so.

And I go so many freckles my skin couldn't hold them in and I had to grow a little bit and it pushed some hair out of my head and funnily enough it's never gone back in.
I met a lot of people and a couple monsters and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, especially when I started carrying around knives and then everyone looked like a monster and I looked like a bearded dwarf with knives.

And sometimes when I wasn't growing freckles or hair I grew terribly lonely and didn't want my body any more, none of it, I wanted to be the water scooped up in someone's hands that could drain away if they weren't looking. And what I realized, like a salmon, was that it was time I visit home because my seventh birthday was coming up mighty soon.
It took me awhile to get there because I had to carry my whole collection of knives but when I got there I crawled on my belly underneath the kitchen window. And I poked my head up and there was Mama in the kitchen baking a cake and singing and this is what she was singing:
Dona
nobis
Pacem, pacem

and she was crying into the batter so hard I could taste the salt through the window. And then she saw me and pulled her shotgun out because of the freckles and the hair and also I had all new teeth.

But then she saw me for me and opened the window and pulled me into her arms and shook me back and forth and said Baby, honey, you're bigger now and stronger now but I sure missed you, kid.