On the verandah you can hear them both laugh
like something bright and restless is in their diaphragms. The riot-laugh of
victor kings and trickster-princes, of handsome boys eager to not miss
this day of school they said they were too sick for two times on Sunday.
Boy tells him each story he has been hoarding secret from you, resting nestled
in his pencil case next to new sketches and old verses:
the girl he’s worried only smiles at him when
he’s clowning enough to get dragged out of Literature by the jacket collar;
the slick word-trick uncle-spider traded him to
                                       get out of the principal’s office when
that one boy finally gets the right hook he has been angling for;
the sunset from the other evening he couldn’t catch in a JPEG jar soon enough
but could still hold on to in a wire of words like the weaver said he could.
And yes, it must sting sometimes to know he can’t reach to you with these things,
that you watch his own father in the other room
                                       clueless that the verandah is even an academy now,
but at least there is this web here, safe, neat, honest. There are worse reasons
for a boy like him to learn to spin a lie. You overhear the boy saying he is so scared
of so many things, and you aren’t sure whether to be pleased or plaintive
that his fears can be so small: failing History and being doomed to repeat it,
not wanting to wear orange for the graduation ball
                                       but not saving up enough for navy,
how no one can tell him what the future holds except your own story to tell, child.
The boy silently worries the teachers will say his hairstyle is so unseemly.
Uncle-spider doesn’t respond. Just draws the route out of doubt
atop his scalp, and grins.

 

(Editors’ Note: “Anansi Braids Your Stepson’s Hair” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 61A.)

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