American Boy by Claire Y. Guo

American Boy teaches me all the ways to say home run. Big Fly. Homer. Dinger. Grand Salami. When he isn’t looking, I anoint each word with their Chinese translations, imagining they are caterpillars morphed into cocoon, too early or damaged to be exchanged for meaning. In my hands, away from his gaze, I grow arboretums of soft-petaled Chinese transmutations, where they harden and become pellets I swallow before speaking, like cotton swabs or Laffy-Taffy. Hello, I try to say, but the garden congeals my tongue and steals the consonants from my larynx. An army of butterflies made fragile by their Chinese exoskeletons flutter by before the first sound escapes my lips.

American Boy brings me to baseball games where I am dutifully ticketed for my words. I repeat after him: Big Fly. Homer. Dinger. Grand Salami. And: Tater. Long ball. Jack. Moon shot. There are always more synonyms to learn, listed on the scrawl of his chin, his two hands, tanned like baseball mitts, no matter how many I consume or squirrel away for regrowth. American Boy seems to get larger every time I see him; American Boy smells like sea salt and aftershave, like butter popcorn and the 4th of July. I touch him, gently, leaving gashes of smoked wood rising snake-like from his wounds. Below me, the baseball players resemble an array of particles with no direction, bouncing, colliding into one another, dragged by invisible fingers towards arbitrary positions. Are you having fun? American Boy asks in a way that suggests there is only one right answer, so I thumb my teeth for yes, and of course, and sure, and definitely, biting back the thick fruits of other, less valuable words. But the sound that escapes is more like a hiss, a snarl. I wonder if American Boy ever ate a word that burned like hot stones on his larynx, if he ever breathed smoke instead of stateliness.

Later, when the concession worker walks over with beer and hot dogs, American Boy buys me a combo meal, indoctrinating my tongue to heaviness, regurgitating salt where I hide the seeds of the words planted between my gums. For a moment, I fear growing rot instead of translations, that my garden homes a different kind of softness. I eat quickly, swallow fast. The froth on the beer looks like American Boy’s aftershave, like an ocean, glittering between the lens of two shivering teeth.

During the seventh inning (in, like to enter but not to leave, like being enveloped, like rudeness without apology), American Boy sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” with the crowd. I am the only one who does not know the lyrics, but when I press my lips together and mutter happy birthday in Chinese, so constrained that only the tail-end of a consonant surrenders, it almost sounds the same. These are the words I trade for him, my American Boy: home team and happy. Peanuts for birthday. Cracker Jacks for a full year. There are so many synonyms for foreigner, thumbed between men with large pockets, scattered in secret thesaurus for home run, and so I know the trade of language is not fair, nor balanced, that I can only hope to pin butterflies to badges and flowers between pages. When the song ends, I open my mouth, prod for living species, for butterflies, but nothing falls out except for larvae, corpses. Blue and red sunning the inside of my jaw. I gasp for something to bite down on. Maybe myself, maybe the butter-bruise of his flesh, softening quickly, but that is not a fair trade either, how he leans in for a kiss and leaves everything tangled, and the only thing I can keep is soft and wilting and scared. 

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CLAIRE Y. GUO — Claire is a fiction writer and poet based in San Jose, California. Her writing has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Trampset, Fractured Lit, and The National Poetry Quarterly. She has been recognized by the Forge Flash Fiction Contest, SmokeLong Grand Micro Prize, Fractured Lit OPEN, and the Adroit Prize for Prose. When she’s not editing, she loves to collect fountain pens and funny words (like kerfuffle).

Art by COURTNEY BURTON — Courtney is an artist, writer, and musician living in Springfield, Missouri. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Ghost Parachute, and Moon City Review.