It was a sunny day, Adam remembered. He wanted to say that it was a hot day, but he couldn’t remember if there was heat. Just the sun in a cloudless blue sky.
    Summertime, definitely. Mom only left him at the day-care center in the summer time. School was his prison the rest of the year. And this, “the Center” it was called, bridged the seasonal gap, when schooling ceased, and yet, still the need for supervision did not. It was ironic, now that he thought about it. Theoretically, shouldn’t one have been educated by that time? Educated enough to know how to supervise one’s self? That was what he had always thought. But others apparently went with the ideological custom that young kids required constant supervision, no matter their level of maturity.
    Unfair, but that was life. Unfortunately.
    But it seemed to him that back in that time there were two lives: one smaller life that was the offspring of the greater, grander life. This bigger life is the one everyone knows. It is the civilized world. It is structure. It is discipline. It is all things working together for a common good … or something like that.
    The other life was “the Center.” He knew of this life, but he wasn’t the only one. Every morning at 5AM, his mother would drop him out of the bigger life, and he would watch from behind the chain-link fenced enclosure known as “the playground” as she drove off to work, and gradually, as the sun slunk over the tops of the distant peaks and illuminated both worlds, others would fall in with him.
    It was a minimum-security prison and a private anarchy ... a long time before the church took hold of his life. Though even back then, he was aware of a divine presence, even if he ignored it.
    All rules were off and all the kids knew it. And those naïve enough not to recognize that things were not the same in here quickly found out. There were activities—toys, the playground, the sandpit, TV –but these were primarily for show, and to keep the kids occupied while the adult supervisors took breaks to go out back for a smoke. Even the supervisors knew there was no such thing as justice in this place. So they only pretended to care when someone stole someone else’s toy, or stepped on someone else’s sandcastle, or tripped someone as they were running so that they would fall and skin their knee.
    And that was also why Adam never got in trouble that day when he kicked the little girl in the face for no reason.

    She couldn’t have been more than five or six years old on that day—that sunny day—so long ago. Adam wondered how many days had passed since then … how many sunny days had the Lord mercifully blessed him with? 5,000? It seemed like a reasonable number. Sufficient enough to allow the thin fog of memory to build up a veil over his remembrances of those lonesome, friendless days … that ancient time when the occupation of church pastor was alien to him … that empty time when the holy life that lay ahead of him was empty, unknown.
    He could still remember that particular day. He remembered the girl. He remembered her lying on her side, on the carpet, inside the playroom, legs straight out, her tiny arms bent upward, resting next to her closed, dreaming eyes, the hands clasped together as though she were praying. He remembered the sun shining through the window of the playroom, the light funneling across the room and reflecting off her short locks of bleached-white hair. He remembered thinking that she looked like that guy—that famous guy, the scientist—whom he had learned about in school. He remembered not remembering the man’s name. He remembered remembering that the man invented a big bomb. When he thought hard about it, he realized that he could remember that he knew her name.
Angie? … Angel? … Angelica? … Yes … Angelica … Yes …
    He didn’t remember why he did it. He didn’t remember anything that would be cause for hatred of this girl. He didn’t even remember having any of those kind of intense emotions back in those days, other than maybe his annoyed frustrations about having to come to this place every day in the summer: getting a face full of sand when the big kids pushed him from behind out of the old tire-swing he glided on, rocking back and forth under the playground’s only tree; or having little colored crayon pebbles bounce off his forehead when the kids across the Arts & Crafts table figured out how much more fun it was to irritate him rather than finish coloring in Snow White’s dress; or shying away from the snickers and stupid chants of “Marky Mark! Marky Mark!” every morning when the supervisors would take attendance and announce his full name aloud …
“Adam Marcus”.
    He remembered these things, but he didn’t remember his frustrations spawning into anything resembling hatred. He remembered something being there, though: a massive, shapeless, unfamiliar feeling that seemed to take hold deep within his gut, building up inside him as he stared for a brief moment at this beautiful child sleeping in a spotlight of sun. He remembered hearing voices nearby—out in the hallway, by the coat rack. He remembered not caring if they heard her cries and came in to see what was wrong and caught him and got him in trouble. He remembered standing above her and raising his right foot, lifting the leg back far … far … and then thrusting it forward with all the weight of all the muscle and blood and bone from his toes to his ribs hurled into it, swirling ahead and slamming into her dainty nose like a flaming arrow. He remembered losing his balance and stabilizing. And he remembered feeling an odd sense of normalcy … release, relief. And he remembered her screaming—the shrill wails engulfing the room and echoing madly off the drywall. And he remembered thinking “uh-oh!” and listening to the voices out in the hallway and realizing that they didn’t know yet. And he remembered still looking down at her … at Angelica … and seeing her with her hands still in the praying position and her legs still stretched out, but with a dark red ribbon of blood now flooding out of her nostrils down to her mouth and dripping from her lips to where it stained the floor. And he remembered running, quietly, into the hallway, behind the other kids, and out the door into the sunlight that blanketed the playground.

    A little while later … a half hour or so … the supervisors had rounded up everyone. All the kids sat on the grass in little rows underneath the shade of the big oak tree from which the tire-swing hung. Adam sat in the very back of the crowd, observing with the other innocent observers as the supervisors stood up front and calmly addressed the crowd.
    “Who kicked Angelica?” they asked.
    Not a word.
    “Who kicked Angelica?”
    Silence.
    Forever silent, forever marked.