Everyone knew I was adopted. You could feel the kids ready to pounce, as kids do, thinking for the first time about what it meant to throw away a human being. You don’t know? they’d ask, giggling. You don’t know who your real parents are?

And to protect myself—to sting myself so hard they couldn’t possibly hurt me more than I hurt myself—I’d say my mom was probably a whore, a slut, a drug addict. Hell, pregnant at thirteen, what else could she have been? Raped, probably, by some loser.

— Craig Mod, Things Become Other Things, Ch. The Fighting Impules, p. 102-103, 2025