Flint

Library Card

On the last day of our vacation in Lake Tahoe we stop at the ski shop and my new stepmother lets me pick out a souvenir sweatshirt.     She is learning how to be a parent and keeps practicing different techniques on me and my sister.     I like this one the most so far.     The best sweatshirt is light blue with a picture of a wolf standing on the top of a mountain HAOOOOOOOWling at a giant yellow moon with its nose in the air and its eyes squinched up.      In 4th period science, Mrs. Whittle told us that hazel eyes are the second least common color for human beings and only 5% of all the people in the world have them.      I am the only one in my family.      Everybody else’s are blue, which Mrs. Whittle told us is the second most common color after brown.     Even my stepmother’s are blue.      But I bet if that wolf opened its eyes they would be the same color as mine because my Funk & Wagnalls Wildlife Encyclopedia says it’s a scientific fact that the most common color of wolf eyes is hazel.     I say “Thank you, Sherry” and “Please may I have this one, Sherry” and then “Thank you, Sherry” again when she says “Yes,” because my stepmother is trying very hard to be nice and I know it isn’t always the easiest thing to do, and I want her to see that I am trying very hard, too.     I have this maybe weird habit of turning everything other than my parents into my parents, which is maybe not weirdo weird if you got adopted when you were a baby, but I don’t know any other adopted kids to find out for sure.      I do it with things like Grama Heslop’s pansies at the cottage because their little purple faces are so friendly, and pussy willows because their little bodies are so fuzzy and soft and pettable, and Tara Sikora’s parents because they buy her every Barbie thing she asks for including the Corvette, and I bet they would buy me a Dreamhouse if I wanted a pretend place to live.     There is a good chance we are going to be here forever because my sister takes a million years to decide on anything, so I go ahead and turn that wolf into a set of parents right there in the store, but with all the right Mom and Dad qualities kind of stuck in the one wolf body, because I know for a fact that you can jam all sorts of stuff inside things without them exploding or popping open.     Kind of like when you pack so much stuff in a suitcase you have to sit on the lid and bounce up and down just to get it to close, but once you do, the latches hold.     I didn’t even have to go to school to look it up in the library or ask Mrs. Whittle to learn that.      I like the idea of wolf parents because I like the idea of being a feral kid, like one of those children who grow up wild in the woods and sleep with bears and lions and eat junk food out of trashcans, and never have to take a shower or a bath if they don’t really want to, which sounds gross but you’d probably get used to the smell and your hair being all knotty all the time.      But I bet you can’t read books if you are a feral wild child, because even if you can read there is no way the librarian is going to give you a library card, not even for the Bookmobile.     And you probably can’t read anyway if you were really young when you went into the woods to be feral, and some people who know these things say that feral kids don’t even know how to speak Human, let alone English, but it could just be it’s because they don’t have anything nice to say so they don’t say anything at all.      But I know if I turned wild and went feral I’d definitely miss books, and probably miss them so much that I’d come back home to whichever parents I lived with, even if my wolf parents were really neat and taught me how to talk Wolf, just like I had been born that way.

Flint is a queer writer with a keen interest in hybridity, generative genre tampering and upsetting the applecart of heteronormative discourse about sex/uality. A 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction, Flint earned an MFA in Writing from CalArts, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Beyond Queer Words, The Offing, Arts & Letters (Unclassifiable Contest winner), Staging Social Justice, CutBank, and Erotic Review, among numerous other publications and anthologies.