Ten years later, I am standing at a riverside dyed by lanterns,
watching my cousin pluck guitar strings with fingers that
found me in the bath—I was thirteen when I swallowed
his sea-black heart. I remember not the shower beating
down on my cousin, but the rain falling through a boy’s
body. Sun-dark hands and salt-chapped lips, teeth that
caught me in our grandmother’s claw-foot tub. I think
I entered his body when he entered mine, when he cried
and said that he was sorry. He was sorry that this was how
he loved me.
(Ten years later, I am twenty-three and my mother tells me
I have become a storyteller because surviving has made me
want to play god on the page—but how can that be, when
words on the page mean I am afraid? Even the man by the
riverside is still strumming chords to melodies of outdated
love songs as if the world has moved on without him—no.
I am sorry. I think I have worded this all wrong. Let me try
again:)
That the storyteller is a god is a lie. I have always been
a beggar, on my knees, held down by bodies I needed
to understand. Back then I told him I’m sorry for making you
cry because the price of entering a story is to lose your way
back. They said I was too young to feel the gravity of what
he had done, but they were not the ones pinned to enamel by
the weight of a body that was sorry it loved them. Ten years
later, he sees me in the crowd, watching him snap
guitar strings with sun-dark hands and a decade
of clutched breath spills out—my name, a secret
coughed up from every sea-black year.
I tell the man who cries with my cousin’s eyes, what I think
I meant in that claw-foot tub:
I forgive you.
Longlisted in the Summer 2022 Reflex Flash Fiction Competition, judged by flash and short-story writer Elisabeth Ingram Wallace, ‘Words on the page mean I am afraid / A conversation with my therapist’ was published on 13 August and is available on Reflex Fiction website. 