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by Bojana Stojcic

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          “There’s nothing special about me,” my son will say ten years from now picking at his pimples, teeth biting through his lip. “I’m just one of thousands of islands in world’s oceans,” he’ll frown as if unsure whether I’m his real mother. “Every island is a world unto itself,” I’ll say. “To come to an island is to come to another world.” These days my precious is wearing a red T-shirt that reads Blue Horizons. Tells me it’s all a matter of perspective pointing to a shark on the wall. “Look, mom, a horse!” I see a shark and nothing but a shark in a shark. “Let’s play a game,” the boy suggests. “You be a shark, and I’ll be the water.” What if the water swallows me whole? I shrink back against the wall, hold my breath as if not to disturb his concentration with any little noise. Dad’s teeth looked almost bruised when he was pulled out. “Don’t be scared, mom. I’ll keep your smile.” I’ll play along, provided I’m an island. Agreed. My torso, limbs and head sway in rhythmic and coordinated movements—backstroke, breaststroke, sidestroke—white turning deeper gray, until I lose sight of shore and become a dot on the map no one knows by name. A deep blackness around and nothing else—nothing like the big island I grew up on.

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Bojana Stojcic, a writer of flash, cnf and (prose) poetry from Serbia, living in Germany, has current and forthcoming work at Barren Magazine, Okay Donkey, Spelk, Versification and Lost Balloon, among others. She hopes to write one day: Her short story and microfiction collections will be coming soon from…

 

 

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