By Nancy S. Koven
He’s not terribly much of a boy, just enough of one to like boy-things: dinosaurs, future noir, sitting too long on toilets. True, he dresses like a boy and rubs his palms together with salty conviction, but his name is Dale, which invites confusion in those prone to it. On the outside, he’s brown and white, but, on the inside, he’s taffy pink. I get to see the pink each evening when he turns inside out, when the little girl emerges to howl at the moon and pee in the yard. She’s the one who killed the dinosaurs, but she still remembers them.
Boys ask boy-Dale if he’s named for Dale Earnhardt, to which he says yes, surely, to which they offer fist bumps and beer. Other times, they ask if he’s named after Dale Carnegie, to which he says yes, of course, to which they clap him about the shoulders and pour rye with bitters. Girl-Dale doesn’t drink either of these, but she does consume blood on special occasions—of leaflitter creatures and nocturnal somesuch—staining her teeth a pretty watermelon punch. She washes clean in the rain and comes to bed smelling of God’s earth and war.
Boy-Dale speaks a central prairie dialect of Standard Boy, which involves rapid exchanges of single syllable strings with other boys. Ho-HO!, Ho-HO! they chant, and Yep-Yep-Yep. It’s an easy language to learn, but a difficult one to master, with endless Earnhardt and Carnegie variants that change the pitch and tempo. Girl-Dale speaks with her eyes mostly, green irises the color of dried grass and recessed deep, trapped like glass bottles in a mud house wall. Girl-Dale’s lips perform endless calculations that, when the wind blows, resonate like low notes on a worn-out flute. Thwuh-thwum-thwek, she says.
I was sleeping when girl-Dale caught a not-Dale boy snooping in the bushes late that summer night. I can still hear their unseemly duet, smell the iron tang on her talons, taste the smoke from the gun that brought her down, see the stranger boy scamper away yip-yip, feel her restless gravity as I flip her inside-out to pop the bullet. Dale’s a good boy now, a very good boy, permanently brown and white, save for the translucent patch of torso that glows fuchsia at sunset. She’s still in there, I know, feathered and fabulous, thwumping intestines, listening, learning, waiting.
Nancy S. Koven (she/they) is a psychologist and professor emerita who divides her time between Maine and New Mexico in the US. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Weird Lit Magazine, The Future Fire, Kinpaurak, Gone Lawn, Thin Skin, Masque & Maelström, and elsewhere. In her writing, she explores the borderlands of mind and body, often with feminist, speculative elements. You can read her work at https://nancykoven.carrd.co/.
MoonPark Review 