Alan Falkingham

The Boy in the Leopard Skin Shorts

When I first met Keegan, he was beautiful, in the way only the young can ever be. It was the cusp of summer, before we ran away together to LA, headlong into a life both magical and flawed in equal measures. And though we watched ourselves unravel, until our eyes became
red-rimmed and our arms pockmarked, I still see him how he was. Not hunched over that pipe on a naked divan, but in his leopard-skin shorts, somersaulting off the roof of the pool house and entering the water straight and clean, like a needle puncturing skin.