People walked their pit bulls by the fence of the basketball courts where the games were played for money. I admired one particularly strong looking dog and pointed him out to my younger cousin.

"That’s the kind you bet on," I said.

My cousin looked down at the dog and then down at me, for he was taller.

"You can’t never tell what them dogs’ll do," he said. "They look strong, all pumped on doggy roids, but when you get him in that ring it’s nothing but a crap shoot. Better luck with dice."

He shifted his baseball cap and spat on the ground. The sun was strong, but the air was cold.

"Better luck playing a switch," he said.

"You doing that already at twelve?"

"You taught me," he said.

"I was stupid," I said. "Didn’t know what I was doing, and me being half again your age–"

I touched my wrists and looked out from underneath the bill of my cap to see the sun slip behind a veil of gray clouds. That was my view for six months, sun and clouds and a greenish yellow grassy plain, framed by a small rectangle intermittently parted by small tubular steel cylinders. Watching it intently, I feared the fall of the rainwater; and all the associations I had learned to make with its sound.

"I am good," he said. "I’m good with cards and I don’t set up shop in the same place twice, though it is more work than shoplifting or–"

He spat at the ground again.

"What’s New York like?" he asked.

"Upstate or downstate?"

"Know all about upstate," he said with a measured false bravado. "I mean the city."

"Nice and big," I said. "Get lost in it. Why you ask? You don’t like it here no more?"

"No," he said. "I like it just fine."

We walked further down and bought pizza from a shop that he liked. We sat down at the small white circular tables and ate. After my change in religion and diet, the pizza was delicious. He smiled at me as he ate.

"You really thinking of staying for awhile?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"Home is brutal," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Trying to enforce a curfew."

"That’s nothing but cheesy man."

"She’s all worried. But I tell her I got everything under control."

I nodded and saw a gang of three approach us. One of them uttered my cousin’s name and I felt a sense of the past sneak up on me.

"Hey, man," my cousin said to the one who had said his name. He beckoned them to sit down and they did.

"This here’s my cousin," he said.

"This the one you was talking ‘bout? The one that just got out?"

"The very same."

I looked around me at this small fan club.

"What’s it like?"

I thought of an appropriate response to the young group gathered around me.

"Well," I said. "It’s the place you find out if you’re a man. If you are, you do okay, like me. If you’re not, it’s a different story."

They wanted stories, but I wasn’t telling any. They started to agree on a time they would all meet–my cousin included–in the park to do whatever it is they do: a switch, a dice game, a little selling on the side. I stood up and went to the bathroom while they worked it out.

When I came back my cousin was urging me to finish my soda or take it with me. I took it with me and followed him. He was very excited.

"What?" I asked as he dragged me in the direction of a series of burnt out buildings.

He came close to me and nodded toward the floor. I looked down and he revealed some red capsules, a small pipe and some rocks up his sleeve. He was smiling and I realized it had been over eight months since I’d had a taste.

I followed him into a building he said was safe. Amidst vermin and broken glass on a graying concrete floor he filled the pipe and lit it. The light from the sun entered through the windowless portals above us; a beam divided by rips in old curtains provided a myriad of shadows inside. We both took a few hits on the pipe and each had a pill, choked down with saliva. I watched the shadows that both covered our activities and danced around us. In the shadows I saw faces of the recent past; their pain shrouded in the same medium that revealed them to me now. I could see the tears and the sweat and the excrement from them, but I could not hear them. I heard only the prayers of the religion I had joined once I had emerged from the shadows, seeking shelter from the abuse, the blood and the excrement. The faces started to recede and the prayer continued. It was musical and I basked in it.

"I just want to get my hands on mo’ bitches," my cousin was saying over and over again. "I just want to get my hands on mo’ bitches."

"What are you talking about?" I said and felt the effects wearing. The shadows were not as deep; the faces had faded completely; only the music remained.

"I want to get with some New York women."

"What? You don’t like it here anymore?"

He took another hit off the pipe and coughed out a billowing plume of scented smoke. I reached for the pipe, but he shirked it away.

"I want to get some New York woman," he said and coughed again.

He started grabbing at the air and howling at a form invisible to me, related to someone whose name was meaningless.

"Give it here," he howled. "You want to die in this alley, bitch."

He mimed a struggle before me and I listened to the prayers in the background seeking salvation. He kicked at the sharp edged shards of broken glass strewn about the floor. A large dagger-like sliver slid across the smooth grey concrete and into a large rat ten feet away from us. I felt a paralyzed spectator to the scene. The rat came slowly toward us.

"You want to die in this alley bitch?" he screamed at the rat who heard neither the music I experienced nor saw the woman my cousin screamed at.

It seemed to instinctively know who had kicked the glass, but it didn’t matter. Out came a long broad knife, the silver blade caked with a rust colored brown, which pierced the black coat of the rat. It was pinned and dying.

"You see bitch," he cried. "You couldn’t just give it over, had to be–"he paused and looked at the rat who had become still.

"Get up," he said. He pulled the knife out of the dead animal and nudged it with his hand. "Get up lady."

I grabbed the knife and examined the blade. My cousin was still talking to the rat when I grabbed him.

"When did it happen?" I asked, the open suitcase on the bunk-bed.

"Last night." Now he was crying, the perverted horror for which he was responsible assumed its rightful place of reality.

"Trying to snatch a purse?"

"She said she would tell. She wouldn’t give me what I wanted. She said I wasn’t no man," he whined in that familiar tone of attempted justification. "I wanted to be a man like you."

And I hit him. I hit him so hard he fell to his knees and the side of his face smacked against the bunk bed’s steel frame. He had tried to rob someone he knew. I told him to pray and I packed for us.

I thought of the city of babble–millions of people, all different languages, smells, customs, feelings and angles. I now found solitude in its masses. My niche was in my ability to find a hiding place. To blend in and pray, and wait for my own personal salvation. Now I left the apartment looking for a niche for two in that city whose vastness was my greatest ally. It was only a bus trip away. We left no note.

Writer Bio: Drew Giorgi has previously been published in The Bucks County Writer, The New York Hangover, New Works Literary Review, and is the author Blues for Beginners.