JASON FRALEY

XXXXIII

Before my freshman year in high school, I experience a growth spurt.  Each morning, I wake surrounded by loose paper, a mosaic radiance.  Mother gathers the sheets, glues them to my
cardboard backer.  I thicken by several millimeters over the summer, though I can still slide under most doors.  My body aches, taut and stretched.  Mother buys me sneakers with extra arch
supports, jeans where a little yellow shows below the cuff.

On the first day of class, the guidance counselor notices, gestures me toward her office.  Have I ever thought about becoming a phone book?  So much gilding and girth seems carnivalesque,
but she tries to persuade me.  No sunburns digging up dinosaur bones, no equations to predict weather systems.  I ask about a catch.  She says my brittle skin cannot accept revisions.  It is
like being born knowing every detail of a tiny, shrinking world.  

XXXXIV

Father’s hands reduce my page glow to a graphite sketch.  My glimmer seeps away when I hand him a screwdriver or watch him grip a baseball, deep palm an expanding cavity Father smuggled from the dentist’s office.  It is difficult to determine where exactly his hands begin, his forearms solid, freckled muscles.

His rough hands—not a lack of gentleness, but a sandpaper quality that comes when skin knows it will be frayed again, when it concludes an incomplete healing is good enough.  An utility knife cut follows his heart line.  Branch scratches vein his knuckles.  A heat blister softens one fingertip.  

One evening, I help him pull on the boat’s cover.  I hear his hands crackle against the canvas when it snags on the motor’s propeller.  I learn to hold my breath in times like this.  For these few minutes, even the cool air is flammable.  

Jason Fraley is a native West Virginian who lives, works, and periodically writes in Columbus, OH.  Current and prior publications include Salamander Magazine, Barrow Street, Pithead Chapel, Quarter After Eight, Mid-American Review, and Okay Donkey.