FICTION November 1, 2024

The Part That Sticks Out

2024 Booth The Flash/Flesh 500 Prize Winner

At church camp, a boy told me to open my mouth.

I did, but only a sardonic half-inch. I didn’t know what I was being asked, really, but I knew to be on guard. 

Wider.

He put a fingertip on my tongue. It tasted like dirt and sunblock and wild onions. 

I wanted to slap the hand away but decided it was more cool not to. Or maybe I just froze. 

We stared at each other for a long moment, his arm in the air between us. The whorls of his fingerprint rested against my tongue, which I held very still. I could not have been accused of licking the finger. 

See, he finally said, turning to the girl beside him. (Had she been there the whole time? She must have, for this was one of the higher-status Jennifers, her hair gleaming and combed and long enough to graze the waistband of her shorts.) 

See? He took his finger from my mouth. My eyes followed this finger many seconds past the moment he’d forgotten it, watching as it was absently wiped dry on the shoulder of his t-shirt, watching as it hung twitchless at his hip as he continued to address the Jennifer. A body part that sticks out, a body part that lets it in. No big deal.

You’re gross. She was talking to him, but as Jennifer and her cape of golden hair departed, I felt implicated.

For the rest of the week, when all the campers were in one place (the dining hall, the mandatory barn dance), my eyes picked that boy from the crowd. I watched him eat a blackened marshmallow. I saw him find a bone in his fried fish. He never again singled me out. I was no different than the other girls who, free for a week from our parents’ supervision, refused to shampoo. To be tangled and feral, we thought, that would be freedom.

Sarah Harris Wallman is the author of the collection Senseless Women. Originally from Nashville, she now lives in New Haven, where she directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College.