Mark

It was with no irony that Mark’s parents looked at their new baby, and signed his name into legality. He wiggled his toes at will, broadened his chest, pointed, gurgled and grew in the way that normal babies do. Mark was a normal baby. An archipelago darkened on his neck and colonized his cheek, and what was invisible on the day he was born dappled his face by the time he was a man, like stains of iodine. Girls treated Mark normally and he was married. Everyone was always polite in the best possible way, acknowledging what was plain for everyone to see, and then forgetting about it except to occasionally congratulate themselves for being so progressive. Sometimes in the small hours Mark looked at himself in the mirror and wondered if he grew up the way he was supposed to, disappointment stealing through the darkest rooms of him.