The Portrait of the Artist as a Gill Man by Knowcebo
“C’mon, Jay Jay, tell her about the watermelon,” said Clark, dripping in the shallow end of Nadia’s swimming pool, the blue water jiggling with sun gleams all around him.
That wasn’t me. I had changed my name a few weeks before Nadia and I got together. I couldn’t be a great film director with a name like Jerry, Jr., much less Jay Jay. I became Jeremiah.
The name change couldn’t hide the big rig my dad parked in front of our shabby duplex or the pot leaf tattoo on the back of my aunt Ruth’s leg, but high school wasn’t going to last forever. I planned to go far away to college and bury Jay Jay for good.
Meanwhile, I just needed to get rid of Clark. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“It’s my birthday,” I said. “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.”
“You sound like a girl,” Clark said.
“You’re an idiot.”
“He is,” Nadia agreed.
Nadia and I were hiding under a sun umbrella. I wanted us to remain as pale as possible for the film project we were going to start working on as soon as I finished writing the script. It was going to be totally experimental, which for me at seventeen meant it would have no plot or any logic at all. Just one brooding image after another. There was going to be a close-up of Nadia’s face pressed next to my mine—a yin-yang of conjoined beauty. It would be the shot that explained everything.
“Yeah,” said Clark, doing his Superman pose, pressing his fists to his hips. “But I know how to have fun, so that makes me smarter than both of you.”
“That makes no sense,” Nadia said, laughing.
Clark and I had been best friends since the fourth grade. I don’t think I had ever hated anyone as much as him.
I especially hated that Nadia let him tag along with us all the time. She did think he was fun. Idiots had that going for them. Life was a big party.
Clark climbed out of the pool. It was about time. His hands were probably turning pruny like they did when we were ten, spending the long summer afternoons in my grandma’s dingy doughboy, with weeds growing around its base. Grandma would have to threaten us with the flyswatter to get us out of the water.
“I have an idea what we can do today,” he said. “But she needs to hear the story before I tell it to you.”
“She doesn’t want to hear the story,” I said in the most snotty voice I had.
“Yes, I do,” said Nadia, waving smoke out of her eyes.
We were both smoking her mother’s Russian cigarettes. I couldn’t take the smoke into my lungs without coughing all the snot out of my nose, so I played with it in my mouth before expelling it in a long, practiced sigh, as if the world had personally disappointed me, which, in my opinion, it had.
As well-off and worldly as Nadia’s parents were, they neither condoned her having boys over without adult supervision nor adolescent smoking, but they were out of the country.
“Tell her,” Clark said.
Then he took off running and did a cannonball in the deep end.
“It’s a stupid story,” I said.
“But I wanna hear it,” Nadia said, staring into my eyes.
Her eyes sealed my fate. She was so beautiful. Not just cute. Not “flawless.” She had a prominent overbite that her braces were still working to correct. But it hadn’t undermined her self-confidence. She had been raised to believe that she was innately beautiful, and that made it hard for me to tear my eyes away from her.
How do you tell someone you want to gaze at their face for the rest of your life? You can’t. They’ll think you’re flattering them. But I meant it.
“C’mon, Jeremiah, tell me.”
“Okay, but it’s not pretty.”
“Good. I hate pretty.”
Did she really mean that? Everything around her was pretty. Her pool, her house, the landscaped lawns in her neighborhood, even her attractive and well-dressed parents.
I looked down at the fraying hems of my cutoffs.
“So my uncle did this thing with a watermelon,” I said.
& & &
Uncle Hank hugged it to his chest like it was his baby, keeping it safe as he swam on his back against the river’s current, the water lapping at his chin, his one free arm doing the work of two.
It was my birthday. I was seven. I had only recently got my head around the idea that adults did what they did for a reason. It might be a good reason or a bad one, but you could usually puzzle out their motivations one way or the other.
Not so with my uncle. Why swim a watermelon out to the middle of the river? I stood on the sandy bank and watched him. No reasonable explanation occurred to me.
Drifting in a slow spin, my uncle looked up and down the river, looked in front of him and behind, and when he was sure he was in the right spot, he gripped both ends of the melon and slid it off him. It sank, dragging him down. His legs kicked.
Staring at his absence, I waited for him to resurface, hearing myself doing the thing he couldn’t, the air drying my parted lips.
Then he was in the world again, swimming back to me. Finding his feet, he walked the last little ways, his hairy legs dragging through the water.
“Where did it go?” I asked.
“It’s on the bottom of the river,” he said, combing back his wet hair.
I squinted at the eddies drifting on the river’s surface, trying to see into the depths. I imagined the watermelon on the bottom. I pictured fish circling it—an intruder in their kingdom. There was an aquarium at the dentist office. I liked to stare at the geyser of bubbles, getting lost in the sway of the artificial greenery planted in the brightly colored pebbles. Did it look like that down there? I was doubtful. Nothing in my world looked as orderly and clean as the aquarium in the dentist office. My world was much murkier, with flickers of sunlight rippling over sunken logs and fuzzy yellow boulders.
“Why?” I said.
“How old are you today?”
I told him.
“You look pretty tall for your age. How tall are you?”
“Don’t answer that,” my father said.
Uncle Hank snickered. “How tall is your dad? Six one?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“By God, I didn’t know they stacked shit that high.”
“Time for a new joke,” my father said.
The joke’s humor eluded me, but its crude language came as no surprise. It was all of a piece with Uncle Hank’s long hair and unshaven face. My dad called him the black sheep of the family but also a good old boy. There was no mistaking the love my father felt for his younger brother, and that made me fear that someday my parents would bring one home for me.
My uncle had two sons, but he didn’t live with them. Or with my Aunt Ruth, who was their mom. He lived with a much younger woman he called his old lady. She rarely showed her face at family events. He wasn’t around all the time, either. I didn’t think of him as a stranger, but like a person who had been a stranger not long ago.
Uncle Hank looked back at the river. “I put that big mama down there to get cold. I’ll go fetch it later.”
My two cousins were leaping off a cliff to see whose cannonball made the biggest splash. I peered over the edge, and my legs got shaky.
“Jump,” Bobby called from below.
Hank, Jr. scrambled up the cliff and got too close to me.
“C’mon, it’s fun,” he said.
I ran away and played in the shallows by myself.
Hamburger patties sizzled on the barbecue grill. I picked up a bundle of pine needles and darted it into the flames. The needles caught and shrivelled to ash. I picked up another and did the same.
“Shoo,” my father said, brandishing the spatula.
I went over to my mom. She was drinking beer with Aunt Ruth in the shade. They took no notice of me and went on talking about grandma.
“Come and eat.”
“Hold the show,” my uncle said. “Somebody’s gotta dive down for that watermelon. Who’s it gonna be?”
“Me, me,” my cousins cried, their raised hands dancing over their heads.
“We don’t have all day. I’ll go myself.”
I joined my cousins at the water’s edge to watch my uncle, but I kept my distance. They were flinging sand at each other. I disliked sand fights. If it had been up to me to pick where to celebrate my birthday, it would not have been at a scrubby swimming hole swarming with the little flies my uncle called no-see-ems.
Uncle Hank waved at us. His sons waved back. I was busy looking towards the far shore, where a jagged line of shade made the water black and glassy. Something had come up out of the water. What was it? Was it a head? A man’s head furred by moss? Whatever it was, it went under again. I glanced at my uncle, who was waving wildly, pretending to be in trouble. I told myself I had seen a fish. Then I saw the disturbance of water moving towards him.
“Al-la-gaper,” I said, messing up the word.
My cousins were now trying to slap each other’s faces.
“Look,” I said louder.
“What?” said Bobby, his complacent smile getting slapped away by his older brother. “Hey!”
Uncle Hank dove, his bare feet the last to disappear.
“There’s something,” I said, starting to point, but the disturbance was gone, as if the head had gone deeper.
“I don’t see nothing,” said Hank, Jr.
I didn’t say anything more after that. I hoped the watermelon would be cold.
Uncle Hank broke the surface, his fingers clawing for a handhold. Something dragged him back under.
“Dad?” Bobby said, sounding small and confused.
His brother tapped his face.
“Stop,” he said, not with glee as before, but in agony. “Dad’s in trouble.”
The three of us stared at the dark red patch spreading on the water.
I don’t recall exactly when aunt Ruth began screaming, but once it got going it stabbed at my ears, nearly deafening me, my father’s shouts and the thump of bare feet on the sand becoming echos in the distance.
The only thing worse than the screaming was Bobby’s soft sobs.
& & &
“That’s crazy,” Nadia said. “I mean it’s totally sad and tragic, but what do you think got him?”
“An unidentified creature slash river monster,” Clark said as he got out of the pool.
He plopped down in the chair next to me.
“What?” he said.
“You’re dripping all over me,” I said.
“Did you tell your family about what you saw?” Nadia asked.
I shook my head. There hadn’t been any place for it between my mom’s hushed phone conversations and my dad’s drunken rants, which were usually about the government, never about what happened to his brother, though I knew better. I didn’t regret my silence. I foolishly told Clark the story when we were kids because we were swapping ghost stories, and the river monster was mine.
Nadia rested her cigarette in the ashtray and laced her fingers together, her rings clicking. She leaned towards me.
“Do you really think you saw a river monster?” she asked.
My story had clearly enraptured her. For a brief moment, I considered putting the experimental film on hold and doing a horror flick instead, but I dismissed the idea. Clark was a fan of those kinds of movies, and he would want to be involved.
“It was probably just a fish.”
“Something slashed him all up,” Clark said.
“It could have been rocks. The police weren’t sure how he died.”
“Yeah, monsters aren’t real, but I wish they were.”
I didn’t appreciate Clark dismissing my story, but I wasn’t going to argue with him about it. I didn’t know what I had seen. It wasn’t a fish. Bobby told me the wounds on my uncle’s body had looked like the work of claws. We only talked about his dad the one time, and he had been very drunk.
Clark got up and sat down next to Nadia.
“So whatcha giving your boyfriend for his birthday?” he asked her, grinning like he’d said something clever.
“Don’t be sexist,” she said.
“I’m not from Texas.”
“You are not as funny as you think you are.”
“I’m funnier. So you guys want to hear what I think we should do today?”
“We’re not stealing a car,” I said. “I don’t care if it’s on your bucket list.”
“No, this is better. Let’s go to the supermarket, get the biggest watermelon we can find and like offer it to your Uncle’s spirit.”
“Why?” I said.
“It’s the anniversary today.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Dude, he was a part of your family.”
“I think we should,” Nadia said. “It sounds fun.”
“I’d rather stay here and work on our script,” I said to her.
“We have the whole summer to work on the stupid movie.”
I winced.
“Yeah, dude,” Clark said. “You don’t need to be artsy-fartsy every moment of your life. Believe it or not, Jay Jay used to be a fun guy.”
“Jeremiah.”
Clark took Nadia’s cigarette out of the ashtray. He put it between his scissor fingers, holding it up in a very hoity-toity way and making a prune face. Nadia laughed.
I wanted to yell at her. She was the one who’d shown me how to hold it that way. I’d been holding it between my pointer finger and thumb like my dad.
I got to my feet and took a hard drag, meaning to blow a cloud of smoke in Clark’s face. A coughing fit derailed me.
Clark laughed.
I glanced at Nadia’s amused face. I felt an urge rising in me, an urge to do something very bad.
Uncle Hank had done time for beating Aunt Ruth. That was why they split.
But I wasn’t my Uncle.
“The movie is not stupid,” I said, crushing out the disgusting Russian cigarette in the ash tray. “And if we’re doing this, I’m going to film it.”
“That’s a cool idea,” said Clark.
“Not like you would do it,” I said, my voice thick with contempt. “We’re doing it my way.”
“Yes, oh great Jeremiah.”
Clark bowed before me. He didn’t really mean it, but he would one day. The whole world would.
& & &
Clark drove. He owned an old minivan his dad had won in a poker game. It rattled. The rattling put me in a bad mood.
“I’m not going in,” I said. “Supermarkets freak me out.”
“That’s fine,” said Clark.
He and Nadia left me to wait in the van.
Flipping open the view finder and switching on the video camera, I pointed it at the bug-splattered windshield, shifting it this way and that until the parking lot came into focus. Why were parking lots so ugly? Sun-bleached asphalt. Faded lines. Yet with the glare of the sun just so, the graying blacktop was a bit more interesting.
How was I going to shoot the swimming hole that had murdered my uncle? It had to be artistic. I insisted on that.
I could make Nadia the focal point. It was hard to make a camera breathe life into an empty landscape. It always looked like CCTV footage: a boring and static nowhere place that was hardly worth viewing for more than two seconds. But put a figure in the frame, just a little bit off center, and you had the makings of some kind of story.
But what kind of story? Not a documentary about my dead uncle. I instinctively knew that was what Clark was going to push for, with him as the star presenter, revealing to
Nadia every last shameful detail of my childhood. Most kids my age romanticized their childhoods. I wished to scribble mine out like a run-on sentence that a teacher had circled in red ink.
At the same time, talking about Uncle Hank had got me thinking about what it had felt like back then. How did you shoot a feeling? Or a sensation of the outside world? I didn’t want to tell the world about Uncle Hank, but I wanted to capture the secret about his death that I had been carrying around all those years, the texture and hue of it, and I guess in some sense that meant the river monster. How did I do that? Clark would tell me to make a mask and shoot a creature feature.
No. We were not doing that.
The side door slid open. A watermelon rolled into the back seat. Nadia got in after it.
Clark slid into the driver’s seat.
“You gonna let me do the honors?” he said. “I really want to do it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, suspicious.
“I want to swim the watermelon to the middle of the river.”
“Why not?” I said. “It was your idea. Besides, I have to film.”
“But it was your uncle,” said Nadia from behind me. “Don’t you have to follow family tradition?”
“It doesn’t matter who does it,” I said. “If Clark wants to get grabbed by the river monster, I’m down with it.”
“You don’t mean that,” Clark said.
I wanted to say that I did, but I kept it bottled. As much as I wanted to be rid of Clark, I needed him for this project.
“Maybe I can do something like Kenneth Anger,” I said.
“Who’s that?” said Clark. “Why’s he angry?”
I ignored him. “Invocation of the River Beast.”
“The creature from the Black Lagoon,” Clark said.
He reached back and grabbed Nadia’s wrist.
“No,” I said, and I meant it.
Nadia playfully slapped his shoulder.
“That hurts,” he said in a baby voice.
“I should scratch your eyes out,” she said, softly scratching his cheek.
I turned away, annoyed by all the touching going on between them, but too busy to think about it too much. I had to figure this thing out.
Clark started the van.
I closed my eyes, picturing my uncle standing on the shore, looking down at me with the benign contempt that all adults felt for weakling children. Could Clark stand in for my uncle? No way in hell. I had never really loved my uncle, but my dad had, and that fact was too intimate for Clark to mess with. But he could be a body, and that was all I needed him for anyway. I would only show the watermelon in his arms. I would not once capture Clark’s face. That would drive him crazy. I loved it.
And what about Nadia? What was she going to do? Scream like my aunt Ruth? I didn’t want that. Or did I? I didn’t know what I wanted, but I would figure Nadia out later.
We got on the road.
“I hope I can remember how to get there,” I said.
“You will,” said Clark.
He was right. I guided him flawlessly. The turns came to me without thinking, as if slants of sunlight were pointing them out.
The van rattled down a winding dirt road to a small parking area littered with gravel and old glass. Clark eased it off to the side, parking in a strip of shade.
Outside the van, the air smelled of warm oak.
“There’s the trail,” Clark said.
I recognized it as the one that led down to the river.
Nadia hefted the melon out of the van. I switched on the camera.
“Let Clark carry it,” I said, pointing the camera at her.
“I got it,” she said, adjusting the melon in her arms.
The footage was going to be shaky, but there was nothing I could do about that. I tilted the camera to make the shakiness feel more intentional. The camera was a voyeur, dollying in to get a better look at a mother cradling her child.
“Stop,” Nadia said.
I felt self-conscious and turned the camera to get some coverage of the van. Who cared about the van? Not me. I went back to Nadia.
She followed Clark down the trail.
Clark broke into a short run to swat at a low branch.
Nadia razzed him for missing it by a half an inch.
I kept filming. What if I went in a new direction and made Nadia the sacrificial victim? I pictured her standing waist deep in the river, the watermelon in her arms, my hand covering her mouth, dunking her under the water. Baptism with a watermelon. What did that mean? David Lynch might have been able to tell me, but he wasn’t around. I had to figure it out on my own.
We kept going. Our feet raised the dust. Nadia sneezed.
Clark mimicked the sneeze, fluttering his voice in lascivious delight.
“You’re such a stupid boy,” Nadia said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, partly for my best friend’s juvenile behavior, but more for bringing her to a place where she clearly didn’t belong.
“Why? Did you fart?” Nadia said.
She and Clark laughed.
The trail narrowed, cutting through a thicket of brambles. A vine caught my long sleeve, and I had to stop to free myself. I nearly dropped the camera in the process.
“This place sucks,” I said.
“No it doesn’t,” Nadia said, waiting for me to catch up. “It’s so wild out here. I love it. My family always goes camping in Yosemite or Hawaii. It never feels wild enough.”
“Trust me, it’s not that great.”
“I bet you liked it as a kid.”
I looked at her through the view finder. There was a lot a camera left out, and that scared me.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Hey, I found the river,” Clark called from up ahead.
I looked. A sparkle peeked through the brambles.
We stood in the sand, looking out at the river. Typical Clark couldn’t go five seconds without ruining something beautiful.
“Let’s go skinny dipping,” he said.
“You’re such an idiot,” Nadia said, pushing him.
“But wouldn’t the water feel so nice on your bare skin?” he asked.
“Yeah, it would.”
“How tall are you, Clark?” I said.
“Oh fuck, man! That’s a good idea.”
“What?” said Nadia.
“That’s his uncle’s favorite joke. We should say it like a prayer kinda.”
There was no way I was giving him the punchline. I stared at the ripples, trying to figure out what they meant, trying to paint the blue and silver dapples with words. If I could capture the look of the river in words, I could get in on tape. That was how it worked. I wasn’t really sure that was how it worked, but I was going with it anyway.
Jeremiah. In a word, that was what the river was. It was me, both as I was and as I was going to be. I didn’t know what that really meant, not in any real way, but it sounded good, and that was all I needed for it to be artistic.
“Can you film for a while?” I asked Nadia.
“I guess,” she said, putting the watermelon down on the sand.
“I need you to. I’m doing it.”
“You mean the watermelon?” Clark said.
“Yep, I’m swimming it out,” I said.
“Ah man, you promised I could do it.”
“I told you we’re doing it my way.”
I was not my uncle, but I was a filmmaker, and a filmmaker had no fear. That sounded pretty good, too. I was feeling invincible.
I took my shirt and shoes off. I put a toe in to test the water. It was very cold. My insides started to shiver.
Was I going to chicken out? Yes or no. It was a clean choice.
I picked up the melon. I waited for Nadia to kiss me. Or do something. Maybe wish me luck.
But she had started filming. My either/or was now being documented.
“Anything you want to say before you get mauled to death?” Clark asked.
I thought about it. Yes or no?
“No,” I said. Then I thought better of it “Maybe.”
Clark put his hand to his heart, doing a dramatic pose. “Goodbye, cruel world.”
Nadia whipped the camera over to him.
Irritated, I started without her. Hugging the watermelon to my ribs, I stepped into the cold river. Instantly, my legs tensed up, and I stopped. I took another stop. Stopped.
I took a deep breath. I just had to keep telling myself that the river monster didn’t exist. It didn’t exist, and if it did it wasn’t still there, all these years later, waiting for me. But what were the chances that my uncle should have died ten years ago? Were they any better than mind?
I stood there, arguing with myself about the river monster until my arms started to get tired. I realized the monster didn’t matter because the watermelon probably weighed ten pounds. It was going to drag me under. Why hadn’t I thought about that until now?
“I think you got to go deeper than that,” said Clark.
“Fuck you,” I said.
I went further out. The current flowed past my knees. I didn’t want to do this. I was not my uncle. I was not a filmmaker. I wasn’t even an actor. I was just a dumb teenager, showing off for his friends. That was what they would say when they fished my bloated corpse out of the water.
I made a new plan. I would swim underwater for a bit and then let the heavy melon drop. I wondered how long I had to hold my breath. If I didn’t get at least close to the middle of the river, Clark would mock me the entire ride back to Nadia’s house.
Could I do two minutes? The last time I had tried to hold my breath that long was in P.E., and that was in the school’s lap pool, with Mr. Danvers blowing his whistle and making sure nobody drowned. I had passed the test, but just barely.
What would it be like underneath the river? Not like a lap pool. I knew that much.
I was not the river. I don’t why I had ever thought such a stupid thing. The river was not art at all. It was a thing that killed art. Or at least artists. The current was moving so fast. I needed to turn back. I had to, but when I turned, I saw my friends standing side by side, watching me.
So I kept going. Why did I keep going? I gasped when the water splashed my belly. It was so cold. And the watermelon was getting slippery.
On the next step I blundered into a hole. The watermelon shot out of my grip. I started treading water, and the current pulled me out. I gave the watermelon up for lost.
But something nudged me. I couldn’t believe it. Watermelons floated. This one did at least.
I grabbed for it. The watermelon became my life preserver. If it had been furred by moss, I might have still considered throwing my arms around it. The current had me firmly in its grip. It was taking me out.
Fear was a funny thing. It was not built for the long haul. The lion’s jaws broke your neck or you got up the tree. Either way, you’re heartbeat slowed.
Incidentally, this was why horror movies had to keep resetting the tension or they stopped being scary. Real life was not a horror movie. I was still pretty scared, but I had ahold of the watermelon, and I was not dead. Things might be…not okay, but less than dire. At the very least, Clark was not going to be able to mock me.
The current shifted and grew weaker in the deeper water. This was my chance to get back to shore. Maybe my last chance. I pushed the watermelon away from me and swam for it, kicking as hard as I could.
I got a little ways, but the current took me back. It wasn’t done with me yet. I let it take me down river. I didn’t want to exhaust all my strength. I remembered my uncle telling his sons never to fight a current because you will always lose. The message had not be meant for me, but I was glad I had received it.
I drifted through the spot where my uncle had gone down. I couldn’t be sure it was the exact spot, but I closed my eyes, waiting for a tug on my ankle.
Nothing. Of course, not. I was not my uncle.
When I opened my eyes again, the far shore was a lot closer. I realized that I could probably swim to it fairly easily. That meant I would have to hike to the overpass to get back. Was that the price I had to pay for my survival? It was worth it. I needed to get back to my friends.
My friends. I spun around to see if they were still in sight. They were. They were waving at me. Were they terrified I was going to drown? I couldn’t tell. They were too far away.
Why were they running now? Were they running to save me? No. Clark was chasing Nadia. He was going to catch her. I knew that. I couldn’t stop him. He got her in his clutches, and she screamed. But it was the wrong kind of scream. Even at that distance, I heard it.
The watermelon bumped into me again. It couldn’t take a hint.
If I had been my uncle, I would have punched it in the face, driven it to the bottom and pinned it down with rocks—done whatever it took to make damn sure it never, ever came back.
& & &
“But like I’ve already said, I was never like my uncle,” I told the actors many years later. “I sank down to my eyeballs, and I watched them kiss. Then I swam away.”
“God,” said the male actor. “That’s a lot different than your screenplay.”
“Yeah, but who wants to watch a movie with a bummer ending? Some dumb kid’s girlfriend runs off with his best friend only for them to get murdered a few weeks later?”
“Murdered?” said the female actor.
“Shotgun to the…” I pointed at my crotch.
“Oh God.”
“I’d watch that movie,” said the male actor.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Here’s the funny thing. It was that watermelon that cinched everything for me. Who knew watermelons floated? Did you? Of course, not. They are so heavy. But they damn well do. So I thought, wouldn’t it be scarier if after the monster takes a victim, a watermelon is all that is left behind. Just bobbing in the water like a head.”
“I love that image,” said the female actor. “It’s like something out of Fellini.”
There was the kudos I had been fishing for, but it wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was too much. I was no Fellini.
“Speaking of heads, you know my dead friends, they weren’t just shot. They had their heads cut off, and the police never recovered them.”
“What?” said the male actor. “Are you pulling my leg?”
“Right under the water.”
“I knew it.”
I smiled. I had taken my tall tale too far. That was what I did, my signature talent or lack thereof. Nadia and Clark weren’t even dead. My mom told me they got divorced last year. I hoped they were both miserable.
“I have to confess something,” said the female actor. “I’m really nervous about getting pulled under water.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be right there with you,” I told her, patting her shoulder with the claw we had designed. I had been wearing it all day as a kind of joke.
She screamed. “Jeremiah, you almost gave me a heart attack.”
Laughing, I said, “Please, call me Jay Jay.”
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Knowcebo 2026
Image Source: Julius Drost from Unsplash.com