HONORABLE MENTION, 2021
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY SCOTT DUNCAN
The Kid shifted in bed. A great weight had been lifted from him, raising him upon a pedestal and exposing him to air and light. Or maybe someone just took off his blanket.
“Wake up, cabrón.” El Viejo again.
“No way, man, let me sleep!”
“Hey, you can’t squat here. Get your lazy white ass up!”
The Kid sat up and scratched his arm. “White ass?”
He looked down. Where his arm should have been, there was something like a fish, covered in yellowish fur. It looked like the arm of a boss, a cop, a rich guy, a president, or some redneck who calls everyone snowflake. It was the arm of a WASP, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
“My arm!”
“Get out of my house, you pervert freak.”
The kid lifted his hand toward the old man, then stared at its paleness. “No, wait, am I sick?”
“Yes, you are sick, pervert. Get out of my house.”
El Viejo wasn’t armed with anything that the Kid saw, but he stood in the middle of the bedroom, waiting for him to leave.
The Kid jumped out of bed and ran out to the bathroom.
In the mirror, he tugged on straw tassels. He pressed fingertips against red freckles. He poked at light blue eyes.
El Viejo pushed open the door. “Hey, I don’t know what your dominatrix or whoever told you to do, but I didn’t ask for no naked white boy in my house. It was bad enough when I was in high school gym class and we all had to stand around naked to weigh ourselves.”
“It’s me old man! The Kid.”
“The Kid is probably outside smoking mota. Are you one of his pothead friends?”
“No, it’s me. Inside. My nose is all messed up. And my hair . . . And I’m just pale. . . .”
El Viejo leaned in and looked the Kid’s face over.
“Oh.”
“What you mean ‘Oh?’ You know what this is?”
“You got ‘the gringo.'”
The Kid turned on the shower and stepped in. The water was too cold.
“The gringo?”
El Viejo sat down on the tattered vinyl cushion of the toilet seat.
“It happened to me before. It’s probably from all the colonialism in the environment. You know, white flour, lead paint.”
“Poison? Or you mean like having Spanish ancestors?” The Kid couldn’t remember ever seeing a Spaniard in the flesh. “Were they like Norway white like this?”
“I mean like not knowing who you are all the time. The effect of pinche Brad Pitt being the center of every story. That snowballs until you are one.”
“Holy shit, I do look like Brad Pitt. Young Brad Pitt.”
“Don’t get too excited, Brad Pitt the Kid. It’ll go away.”
The too-cold water became too hot as The Kid rubbed his alien cheeks. He did eat a lot of flour tortillas. He also ate wheat bread with all those seeds. Wouldn’t that help against “the gringo?” or would it make it worse?
“When does it go away?”
“I dunno. Some people have the gringo for years. Then, something will bring the brown out, so not even your Brad Pitt skin can deny it.”
“Years?”
The Kid stepped out. El Viejo was going on about how when he had the gringo, he dressed in sweaters and voted Republican, but the Kid wasn’t listening. The bathroom mirror was offering possibilities. He wouldn’t be scary to old gringas, or be hassled by police, teachers, or anyone, as long as “the gringo” lasted. He could be listened to; he could make real change. He could organize, give brown people a shot and . . .
“Hey.”
“What, old man? Your story done?”
“No, your skin is brown again, cabrón.”
The Kid turned his palm over. He wasn’t Brad Pitt anymore. Just another brown kid.
El Viejo flicked a towel over to him.
“Welcome back to being a beaner, m’ijo. Get ready, we got work to do.”
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Scott Duncan-Fernandez a.k.a. Scott Russell Duncan’s fiction involves the mythic, the surreal, the abstract, in other words, the weird. He is Indigenous/Xicano/Anglo from California, Texas, and New Mexico and is senior editor at Somos en escrito: The Latino Literary Online Magazine. In 2016 he won San Francisco Litquake’s Short Story Contest. His piece “Mexican American Psycho is in Your Dreams” won first place in the 2019 Solstice Literary Magazine Annual Literary Contest. See more about his work, publications, and “Quasi-Vato” blog on Scott’s website scottrussellduncan.com