It’s late, he said apologetically, I know you go to sleep early, I wouldn’t have rung the bell except I saw your light. Ka k si, he said, smiling a little, and I said I was fine, a little tired maybe, but all right. Then he looked up, almost embarrassed, as if for a moment he had forgotten I was there. Mitko sat and tore into his food, not pausing until almost all of it was gone. It disquieted me somehow it was a whole world molded for a kind of carelessness I doubted had anything to do with childhood, a carelessness I couldn’t remember ever feeling. The room was dark now, and the door was locked, as Mitko found when he tried to turn the knob but we could make out bits of the brightly colored interior, the plastic cubes for climbing, plush seats in the shapes of cartoon characters. To the right of our table there was a closed glass door leading to a room for children’s parties. We walked with his tray to the most secluded corner, as far as we could get from the other diners, a few couples, one large group of friends. Mitko grabbed the milkshake as soon as the server set it down and put the straw to his lips, and it was a joy to see his eyes widen with pleasure when he tasted it.

I expected Mitko to load his tray with far more than he could eat, as he usually did when I bought him food, but he only ordered a sandwich, fries, and at my insistence a milkshake, which he had never had before, he said, it had never occurred to him to try one.

His novella Mitko won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award. Greenwell is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. The following is from Garth Greenwell’s novel, What Belongs to You.

Greenwell what belongs to you