Authors: Elias Anderson
Next to his brother’s tombstone was his own. Just his name
and birth date. He knelt in front of his own tombstone, wondering at the mental
state of his mother when, after losing Davey, she’d just gone ahead and
purchased a family plot. When Davey died his mother had died, too. The part of
her he’d needed, at least. He ran a thumb over the carved letters of his name.
Sunshine Basquiat Jimenez; how he had always hated that
name.
He smiled, remembering Bobby asking him why a kid with a
beaner last name was so damn white. He’d shrugged at the time because he hadn’t
known that he’d been adopted by the man whose grave he was now practically
standing on, and had been given his last name in place of the one he’d been
born with. He didn’t know then that he would never, ever meet his biological
father.
Bobby had asked him if he liked being called Sunshine and
when he shook his head no Bobby had stared hard at the nametag they’d all worn
that first day of school.
“Fuck it then, we gonna call you Jim,” Bobby had said,
pushing his index finger against the first syllable of
Jimenez
, as it
was written on the nametag.
So, it was Jim he had become and it was Jim that he had
stayed. He thought of a girl, a beautiful girl with a scarred lower lip that he
once wanted to marry and how she never even known his real first name, and how
he didn’t know, right now, where she was, or if she was okay, or if she was
maybe buried here in this same cemetery. He thought of the boy that had started
calling him Jim and thought that maybe he should look Bobby up and then
remembered the smiling little boy had grown up to be Two Step, and the sound it
had made when the bus knocked the life out of him.
Jim looked up at that empty, endless sky, and wanted to spin
there in the grass. The need to do so was like a spider inside his head,
drawing on long strands of poisoned silk, pulling trapped pieces of his soul
closer, ever closer. He closed his eyes and wanted to spin until he was sick or
just feeling anything but how he really was.
He wanted to, but he didn’t, and at the moment that was all
he could really hope for.
END
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If you loved this Book by Elias Anderson
You should try another of his titles,
Born in 1978 in the wastelands of southeastern Montana,
Elias Anderson was moved to Colorado at the age of six weeks. He spent the next
21 years in various parts of the state until relocating to California and
Oregon, only to settle back in Denver with his wife and two daughters.
His professional writing experience ranges from staff writer
and reporter for the Coastal View News (Carpinteria, CA) to food critic,
freelance copy writer, and editor. He has published poetry, articles, essays,
and short stories in a variety of hard copy and web-based publications