... I was updating The Butterfly Effect. Somehow writing about big Tim led to me starting a spinoff about little Tim.

August 16th, 1958

They had to nail the coffin shut.

"It ain't your fault," Tío Luis says, in his mix between an East Texas accent and a nasal Mexican one. He's twenty-two and Tim looks up to him like he's God— feels small and wet and threadbare, compared to him, swimming in a borrowed suit. "What happened to Carlos."

"Curly says it was. 'Cause I wasn't there to stop it."

"Curly's eight. He don't know shit from Shinola." Luis pats him on the shoulder; Tim leans into his side a little, too tired to support his own weight anymore. "Your dad had a real suicidal streak, trust me. I'm surprised he made it past thirty. Didn't have nothin' to do with you."

He lights up, right there in the cemetery. "You want one?" he says, holding out the pack like Tim is a full grown man, having a smoke at a funeral and shooting the shit. Don't even think about it, you're too damn young, Dad had said when he caught him rummaging through his pockets, and punctuated the words with a sharp slap upside the head— funny, what he was too young for and what he wasn't. He was probably just pissed about losing the cancer sticks he spent good money on.

Tim nods a yes, and he knows to breathe in when Luis flicks the lighter. "You oughta come live with me now," Luis says, sputtering out a stream of curses as his cigarette smolders in the rain. "It'd be great— us two bachelors. I'd teach you how to play decent poker."

"Really?" Tim tries not to snap his spine straight up at the offer, look too desperate, but his heart still pulses in his throat. "You mean it?"

"Nah," he says with a weak snort, and Tim gives the mud at his feet a kick, though he never should've expected anything else. "I'm talkin' out my ass. Fuck, I can't take care of no kids. You'd be washin' down every meal with a glass of whiskey."

"I wouldn't mind," Tim says, hating the beg in his voice but unable to stop. "I ain't some dumb kid, shit, I been lookin' after Ma and Curly and Angel when Dad went inside, I been pushin'—" He cuts it off, choking on his own tongue. "I wouldn't put you out."

He's not a kid anymore. The word's sat wrong in his stomach, like something that can't be digested, since the first time his father put a pistol in his hands and let him cradle the greasy metal, memorize every contour of the trigger.

"Yeah, yeah, you're a real tough guy, I forgot." He flashes him a rare smile, incongruous with the atmosphere around them, and ruffles the hair he spent hours slicking down in front of the mirror. "When you're a lil' older an' Alberto gets his ass outta the pen, man, we're gonna tear this town up. Make 'em all our bitches. What do you say?"

"Sounds good," Tim says, shrugging, and they fall into an uneasy silence.

"Feels like all my brothers done gone to shit," Luis finally says. "Alberto ain't gettin' sprung until next year, now Carlos got himself an appointment with the Grim Reaper..." He shakes his head like a wet dog. "I know he's a little asshole, but you look after Curly, entiendes? Ain't nobody you can trust 'cept family, Timmy. You'll figure that out soon enough."

Tim breathes wrong on his barely-smoking cigarette and coughs, coughs, coughs, tears still stinging his eyes when he straightens up again— he could probably cry, at a funeral, but Dad once called him a faggot for crying about a cut leg and old habits die hard, so he blinks fast. He doesn't want Luis to see.

"It ain't the worst thing that could happen to you," Luis says. "Your daddy just bein' dead. Even if they carved him up good."

"How?"

They had to nail the coffin shut.

"He could've left." Luis pulls his jacket tighter around himself, as the wind picks up. "Hopped on the 7:30 bus to Muskogee and started a new family— your granddad did. Happens all the time. But for some goddamn reason, your mama wasn't enough to make him run like a bat outta hell."

Speak of the devil, Tim's ma swoops in then, clenching Angela with one hand and Curly with the other. Curly's crying because Dad's dead. Angela's still too little to really understand— she's crying because she wanted to wear her fairy princess dress, the pink one with the wings, but instead she has to wear a scratchy black one. "I told you not to come here," she says, spitting out ropes of damp hair. "I told you not to fucking come here."

Tim has never heard her cuss before. She might have had three children out of wedlock, but she sure believes in honoring God with your language.

"You can't keep me from my own brother's funeral."

"You're the reason why he's six feet under," she says, slashing through the air with her hand. "You and your dirty dealin' brothers... don't you talk to my son again." She lets go of Curly to pull Tim against her, but there's no affection in the gesture, only possession. "Don't you send him to a grave right next to his daddy's."

"Stupid gringa whore," he says, but with none of his usual sparks and fire; it slips out bitterly, and he isn't looking at her, no, he's looking off into the distance, at the headstone. "How's he gonna survive in this world, huh? If he ain't tough enough to dish nothin' back to it?"

"Timothy Shepard, get that thing out of your mouth," she orders, noticing the cigarette he's sucking on. Before he can, she snatches it out from between his teeth and crushes it under the heel of her shoe. "We're leaving. Right now."

"You ain't my boss," Tim says, tilting his chin up defiantly. "I wanna stay."

"Tough shit," she says— second cuss word— and starts hauling him away from the headstone by the elbow; he waits for his uncle to come to his defense, realize he wants to take him in after all, but Luis is silent now, folded into himself and drifted somewhere far away. He's not nearly old enough or strong enough or tough enough yet to be worth that kind of effort, to have been useful to anyone but his father.

His dead father.

(His mother loves him. She must love him, if she doesn't want him in the morgue or in the pen. But her love gets inside his lungs like mustard gas, suffocating him, and for a fleeting moment, he wonders how his life would be going if she were the one in the ground.)