Boy
Janalyn Guo
You ran onto a bridge under construction, little fish paths beneath your feet, small enough to put your finger over. What a giant you were. You turned toward a love; you were always before him. You spent your entire boyhood running ahead. Dad, the bridge changed? A curl into a question like a cat tail. The brush against; the oomph in your vernacular.
It had changed. A version closer to a perfected system of connection, or suspension. A difference you bit into and held as all your teeth erupted. Jaw surgery made your speech different. Your chin emerged from behind a door.
You’re fishing into mud water. You don’t let your teeth yellow. When you dream of missing teeth, you know what it means: dying, not your own—never that—but of destinations and harbors, of things that exceed you, of the time-machine on your father’s shoulders, arched over fish, scaling. The scrape of his wristwatch against stone. He’s getting close to the end of his fish; he’s got you turning tripe. You want access beyond the mudbrickwalls of words. You want an opening in the shape of your figure everywhere.
Janalyn Guo lives by the beaches of Norwalk where the air is interesting. Her most recent fictions can be found or are forthcoming in elimae, Bat City Review and the inaugural online issue of Interfictions. She is an editorial assistant at Unstuck Books.
