i met a soldier while stationed in the passes who told me of a poor widow in the town where he grew up who lived alone with her son. her husband died when the boy was young, so the boy lacked a man’s influence in the house. but the widow had a secret weapon, passed down to her from her own mother: in a drawer she kept a magic eraser, and when the boy displayed some fault or defect, she’d grab the eraser and rub it out of him.

the way he combed his hair. gone. or his sad manner with the other boys. gone. a tendency for long walks alone. gone. she erased them while he was sleeping, adding a little baking soda and elbow grease. by the end of the night, the boy’s flesh would be kneaded and soft, pink and worn down. and when he stood up the next morning, he would stumble about and drool a bit from the bottom lip.

the results in time were muddled. bald spots in time went utterly blank, and whole systems within the boy would go dark inside: fields of dream, interwoven ambitions, all motion subsided, like a carnival slowly shutting off the lights or a rollercoaster going dark at its peak ascent.

a time or two his mother hired an artist who came and etched in the missing pieces, a penciled prosthetic, inked in incrementally so others might not notice. but the foundations, they’d all whisper, have been worn away: the boy will soon collapse. 

but still the woman couldn't resist. with every passing day, some new flaw emerged. they would fall out of him, like eggs from a chicken, without his being awares. she stopped letting him out of the house. she stopped feeding the boy and bathing him. she stalked him in his bed late at night and sat there like a monkey on his back, erasing every line in his spine, his torso, his fingers, and toes, those little toes she kissed when he was just a babe. perhaps the babe was in there still. deep inside, in whatever was left of him. but eventually the boy was no more. no blood. no fibers of hair. no fingernail clippings. just pink eraser crumbs, all the way up to his mother's ankles.

no one could say she "killed" him exactly, so all the townsfolk tried to stay out of it. but the widow would show up in town on holidays, begging out of a cup and swearing with hand over heart that the boy had come back. that he sat with her late at night and watched over her as she slept. that he was slowly erasing her, too. soon she would be invisible. soon she would be gone.

she raised her hands to the townsfolk: in their place were two bloody stumps.