Experiments the summer he died
I won't say with whom. I was fourteen when we played strip poker in the dark, when we were supposed to be sleeping. When we were naked, we couldn't help but notice that our penises got hard. We proceeded to rub our erect cocks together until one of us had "wet," and we were never sure which of us had. Their older sister accused us of "getting queer with each other," and we didn't know what that meant, either. This repeated each night until the call came, and Mom told us that Dad had fallen grievously ill and might not make it. I knew that my desperate prayers for him, cast repeatedly against the impossibly starry Kansas sky, would be futile. God only answers the prayers of the righteous, I knew by then, almost as well as I knew I'd sinned greatly, without understanding its nature. I didn't know, wouldn't be told until we'd traveled back home, that he was already dead. I wouldn't know for another year that his death was self inflicted, or that he wasn't my biological father. My guilt was not assuaged by any of these pieces of knowledge. Whatever other details were involved, I knew he'd died because of my sin.
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