Just hours earlier, he was strolling through apple orchards. His sister, annoyed at the fact that he didn’t pick one apple the entire time. Too busy playing with a black and orange caterpillar he scooped up from the middle of the road before certain squishy death by an oncoming pickup truck. A slowly marching eyebrow. He had set it free along the bark of a tall elm tree before we were to board the tractor. It climbed about twelve feet high, stretching its furry body before turning around and coming back down where Charlie scooped it up again into the bowl he had formed with his hands.

He let it explore his turning wrist and urged it to travel up his forearm, placing a winesap leaf under its tiny tickling feet.

"Charlie, you haven’t even picked one apple," Maeve clamored.

He smiled and stroked his caterpillar’s back very gently.

But that was earlier in the day.

Now a large seaweed green vein bulges from the side of his neck as he awaits the needle’s impact. When the needle goes in, it hurts him badly. More than usual. He wants to be a big boy. He wants to handle the pain without crying. But he’s still just 7. He presses his head into the brown cushions, his body taut. He doesn’t cry. But with eyes closed and a look of misery on his lips, he begins to beat up the chair. Two vicious upper-cuts to the underside if the chair’s arm. He digs his nails into the base of the chair and drags them downward like a cat does a scratching post. Until the pain goes away. Then he asks something completely unrelated to the situation.

"Do the people at football games get to keep the footballs that fly into the crowd?"

Diabetes sucks pumpkins.