Isaiah Kane

Bacao

From an early age, Bacao had a faint, but curious suspicion that his world was not quite what it should be. Walking down the street, he would peek into minivans and see mothers coddling cell phones and talking into their children. He would see lips sometimes where eyes should be, and eyes at times on the wrong side of a face. He would grab his mother’s hand only to find it wasn’t a hand at all, only a glove in the shape of one. People he passed saw only straight ahead. Look at me, he would think, and he would dance and shout but they wouldn’t look. When he was crossing the street, only then would the cars stop, and when they didn’t his mother cursed them and they would disappear forever. When he returned home, he would sit in the backyard and watch the trees grow, but they never grew. He’d be there all day and into the night, and besides the occasional leaf that was knocked off a branch by a brief gust of wind, nothing really ever changed. The stars never seemed right either. There were too many or too few, and when he counted them, new ones kept appearing and those he had already accounted for were nowhere to be found. Sometimes the sun and the moon would trade places, sometimes they’d melt into each other for a moment, and sometimes they were gone altogether.