May 1, 2022:
He wasn't dangerously emaciated. He was an ordinary lanky little growing beanpole, loving and well-meaning and sweet.
They left him with such broken body-image. That he was hideous, that no girl would love any boy so deformed.
She told him the child authorities would take him away if he didn't gain weight. They'd call her a bad mother, send him to live with strangers.
She considered sending him to military academy. Purely to fatten him up. They visited one once. Afterward he went very butch, for fear it might come true. If you want me military I'll be military right here. She thought it meant he loved the idea.
"You're nothing but skin and bones," his sitter told him sadly. Shaking her head for the sorrow of it.
The photos show someone very different. He even has rosy cheeks.
Why did they do that?
Them, and that very grave mistake exactly a decade later.