After his long voyage in the penitentiary, Uncle Serafín spent
nights tossing on the shifting cot, his one open eye having words
with the stars. When the first gale lashed the twenty thousand blue
gum leaves, he leapt up and ran into the night, ribbonfish bouncing
off his back, through the waves of houses up to the ancient blue
gum our abu had planted, at last tremendous enough for Serafín
to gaze past the shipwrecked years to the days he learned to swim
in his mother’s belly. Before our shouts could reach him, the tree
swept him up. Up, up he swam, his bullhead pushing deep into
crashing branches. Between lightning bursts his crown breached
the boughs, a foot flashed its underbelly. The blue gum pitched and
howled, spat glistery fruit into night's roiling current; out it spouted
a school of sparrows, glinting like a fishy constellation; out
cartwheeled Serafín’s pajamas, top and pants swooping in contrary
arcs then tumbling together like trapeze acrobats. At last we
spotted Serafín whipping one-armed from the tree's topmost hand,
naked, slick, stars flicking his ankles. Hours and hours we watched
him kick and battle, except when we drowsed, up until the tree
crouched to the ground then sprang up, slinging him into the starry
stream. After brunch we found him gulping for air, swamped
on the road to the penitentiary. Don’t touch me, he spurted, and we
obeyed, forever. And, so as not to be carried off to some place
from which we couldn't swim back, we chopped down the blue
gum as well.
Lis Sanchez has writing appearing or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Salamander, New Orleans Review, The Bark, Lunch Ticket Amuse-Bouche, The Boiler, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Writer’s Fellowship; Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing; Nimrod’s Editors’ Choice Award; The Greensboro Review Award for Fiction, and others.