June (excerpt)

Context: June is 2 years old and his mom is named Ariel. I refer to her throughout the piece as the Ghetto Mermaid. I play on thematic metaphors of the sea, sea creatures, and water throughout the piece.

June and I spent two days together. Most of which was me running behind him as I watched his pupils go from brown to golden yellow, alive with the glow of mischief that was his insatiable urge to climb up and then jump off of things. Born to a mermaid, June was just as at home underwater, and I became his Octopus Guardian. Some tentacles caught the things that threatened to shatter as he knocked them off of tables, yanked them from shelves, others reached out to add a step in the gaps that existed between the floor and the heights of the counter top, bed, and bathroom sink that he tried to reach. June longed for home, and this part of the Earth would never be enough for him. He would place his foot on the lowest rung of one of my bar stools, grab the spinal leg of the chair, and summon all of the might that he had gathered in his two years here, to bridge the gap between the chair’s bottom and its seat. Sometimes he got close, most times I would extend a tentacle. My limb became a padded spring. It sent June to the height that was his holy grail: the counter top. Once he made it, he would lean forward and turn on the faucet. But after a while, the mere running of water wasn’t enough, and June began a scoot-crawl-fall routine into the sink. He did so with so much zeal, and so much success, that before assisting his ascend to the counter top, I would walk around the kitchen island and do the dishes. If he was going to end up in the sink, it might as well be clean, and so I would sit him next to me on the counter while I washed. But June was taken to another place with the sight and sound of running water. The sun coming in through the windows bounced around until it reached my June, and once they met, we were enveloped in a room of teal and indigo, as the sun reflected the colors in June’s yellow that had been hidden from my sight, but caught the attention of the sun with the running of the tap water. The thinnest beam of light, inconsequential if not for its brightness, erases the dishes from my vision, and replaces them with a glitter of rhombuses that I blink and blink and blink away, but are stuck on. Blinking and blinking and shaking my head, I’m not afraid, but frantic to see what thing of glitter and translucence this beam of light, thin and blinding, is reflecting off of. I turn off the faucet, and the apartment darkens, cools. The sun has shifted in the sky, called away from us and drawn to some other being.

“June, what the hell was that?” he breathes a smile and reaches for his big toe, turning his foot and showing me its bottom. He must have felt his return to this home, and away from his mother’s, with the end of the sink’s running water. I knew he did, because of his timing. As I looked at his foot, a single rhombus, glitter teal and indigo, was disappearing. I could see now that a moment before, his foot had been covered in scales and that was the light source that the sun had bounced off of and blinded me with. The sun had come for June. I finished the dishes and put him in the sink.