Shitsick (Hans Burger)

-an excerpt

THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY REMAINS VIVID, even fifteen years later. I can close my eyes and I am a child, running over a field in late spring, tall brown grass over dirt packed into hard lumps. In the eye of memory, the sun is just beginning to go down. One boy stands to the side and watches while I chase another with a long stick. I have dipped its tip in some unknown type of animal feces and dubbed it my shitstick.
Introductions must be made before we go any further, and since we're all children, let me frame them in the cultural vocabulary of a child. One by one, each of us freezes in mid-air, and our Latin names appear beneath us, like the introductory reel in a Roadrunner cartoon. I am paused in mid-sprint, falling forward on my tall and lanky frame, shitstick extended in front of me: Hansicus Scatologicus, inveterate prankster of the quasi-obscene, soon-to-be graduate of what I never tire of referring to as "turd grade."
Frozen ten steps ahead of me is my friend Baba, Kickassicus Intimidatum. Baba is a year older than me, bulky and strong in the shapeless way of a child, and I am aware that he could beat me to a preadolescent pulp if he chose to, which makes it all the more entertaining to push his boundaries with my shitstick. 
Standing off to one side is Flynn, Cowardus Pacificum. It's hard to tell when the camera freezes on him; the only motion that stops is the slow pan of his head as he watches our chase. Flynn and I are in the same grade, but he's ten months younger, small and shy, red-haired and freckled, the only son of a rich, absentee father. In seven years we will all envy him; today we're ambivalent about his mere presence. 
And the frame resumes, as we scrabble over the uneven ground. Baba can keep ahead of me, but I won't let him rest. He's stronger and faster, but I have endurance born of perverse joy. He's disgusted by all this, and that fills me with happiness and pride. I'm swinging my shitstick back and forth in broad strokes like an epee, shouting, "Come on, I've got a present for you! It's my new invention! Come on, man, check out my shitstick!"