Tag Archive for 'fiction'

This is the mundane power of a name.  A thing they call you, and when they say it, you turn your head.  Whether you turn toward them to acknowledge or turn away, keep shuffling forward as if you didn’t hear, it doesn’t matter.  A name is a tug on a leash.

This is the enduring flow of a name.  The source can be the slightest spark of imagination inside a kid’s head, just one look at you and he makes some connection in that underfed brain of his, somewhere in that primordial muck of cartoons and big daddy’s drunk talk.  And when it pops out of his mouth, everyone else picks it up and spreads it around because, however clever or inane it is, it’s catchy—quick and apt.  Toss it around the playground, make sure everyone knows.  And, years later, when everyone’s forgotten that afternoon when you first got your common name, when whatever was on your birth certificate got erased and redrawn in scrawling, elementary letters, when all aspects of that day—falling, scattered leaves, tough rubber ball, the scrape of girls’ shoes on the pavement—have faded only one thing will remain.  Intangible as it is, they grip it tight like a ticket, their admission into the culture.  A name is the longest unit of time.

Ghost, he called you.

Continue reading ‘Swallow Your Tongue’