Daguerreotype
My dad says that I am ugly in the summer while we sit on blankets in front of the Ojibwe River. I walk down to its edge and wade into the fresh, cool water. I turn around and there he is like a corpse or like a coyote or like a memory that hasn’t become a memory yet.
Memory’s surface craves dust. It is the flesh and blood of time. I wait for it to fall (because he is dead). There is dust in my dad’s hair. It is thick and curly and black. Late summer evenings these days, he stands in the backyard next to the garden beds, illuminated by the bistro lights, waiting for me to come outside.
Memory is silver and copper (the colors of the river where I am dead). My dad drowns. He drowns me and now I am dead. Who is ugly now? Now we walk through the sand to our blankets, dripping with river water. We sit down and we crack salted sunflower seeds in our yellow teeth. Sometimes memory does not stand still and in this aspect, it is a Super8. Or so it seems to me.
Super8
Dead on the banks of the Ojibwe River. A murder of crows circle in the air high above my body. At night, the coyote eats me. Sometimes it is good that I am dead.
I have fair skin and blue eyes. My hair turns blonde in the sun. The coyote is my father. The crows are my mother. See them. They have ruined my life.
It is another time and some other lie, and I have an older brother in this other lie. He is murderous. We smoke pot in front of a fireplace in the forest. We laugh about nothing. We laugh about everything. It rains in the forest. Don’t touch us. There is no touching us.
The coyote communicates through telekinesis from the other shore because we are dead. I die on the banks of the Ojibwe River many years ago when my older brother drowns me. White clouds in the blue sky hover over my dead body. What a beautiful day it is.
It is a lie that I gasp for air through collapsed trachea. I die like a carp out of water. Ha! Ha! Ha! What a funny joke he plays on me. I die here. I live forever here. This is what happens when you die. Go on living until the end of time.
Early in the morning, the coyote tells me all this via telekinesis in the backyard next to the tall pink snapdragons in the long flowerbed and it is misting in the Berkeley Hills.
Joel Tomfohr's fiction has appeared in Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Hobart, and others. He teaches ESL to immigrant newcomers from all over the world at Fremont High School in Oakland, CA.