Anyone Can Be a Pirate
by Jose Chaves
This is the
year my mother says, why don't you just wear a nice ball on your
head for Halloween? It would be an original.
Nobody wears
a ball on their head, I say, and the kids would kill me. I want
to be a pirate.
It would be
so light, she says, you wouldn't even notice it. We could paint
it any color you want and fasten it with a thread so thin, it would
look like magic. Besides, anyone can be a pirate.
I don't care,
I say, the kids will kill me.
An hour later,
it's finished. With only a balloon and some gluey strips of newspaper,
we construct a ball of paper-mache about the size of a grapefruit.
I want a smaller one, but my mother insists. Anyone can wear one
the size of a lime, she says.
I don't know
how many times I'm called Gonad-Head or Captain Testicle, before
it's stripped from my head by three pirates, then trampled to the
pavement with my empty bag of candy.
I take back
a muddy strip of newspaper peeling to show her what my night was
like. She just shakes her head and tells me it's still beautiful.
To this day she keeps it on her dresser, in the mouth of the egg-carton-alligator,
she calls her memor
Jose
Chaves writes: "I am currently living in Bogota, Colombia on
a Fulbright Scholarship putting together an anthology of the Latinamerican
prose poem and mini-story. When I am not in Colombia, I live in
Portland, Oregon where I teach Spanish and creative writing. I have
an MFA from the University of Oregon and have been published in
"Highbeams," "Octavo," "Jeopardy," among others."
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