The Shark

by Olivia Coletti

Before I knew to bare teeth to the world, my best friend was a boxer with clenched chubby fists. To the world and to his mother and to anyone who had the insurmountable luck of calling him theirs, he’d raise his tiny hands to the sky. If the fireflies were out, he’d say they needed to be caught. Life was a commodity drained through a sieve and every day I spent with him, I believed him, always. When he said he could fly to the moon, his star-studded eyes told me he could. when he said he could touch the ceiling, the mattress on the floor and sprained wrist told me he was human, but it didn't matter because he had the handprint on the ceiling and on my heart. He went to my tea parties and drank from my sippy cup and broke my plastic mugs and one time we huddled underneath the doorway in his tiny house. We were bracing ourselves for impact, but all I could see was this little box of his world and how I was in it. How I longed to be in his world. He made me laugh, sticking out his tongue but the earthquake came and I bit my cheek. I tasted blood and his laughter for days; I only tasted sweet. Then, as surely as he loved mango sticky rice, he swam across the ocean that contained our favorite sharks and whispered goodbye. He had never been so silent. Before he left, I told him my favorite shark was the blue shark because it swam super, super fast. I told him “Swim back to me like a blue shark” and never saw him again. I found him later in the lightning bugs that come out in late July and their song is his voice, he is telling me to buck up. He is saying he will light the way for me, that he is my shiny star. He is the scream when things get quiet when he shrieks that he is going to be big, big like Thomas the Train. He was so sure that to have one had to take, that this ability to be was a currency to exchange, but I disagree. I will hold his existence as my bottom dollar until I see him again and then I will tell him that he is an idiot, that he is the richest diamond the world has to offer.

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