‘A Boy Who Does Not Remember His Father’
— Joyce Chong
Maybe his father hides because the sheriff is after him. Yes, his mother says, that is closer to it.
This week, a short story published in Smokelong Quarterly written by Joy Baglio, on the divide between truth and belief and the types of realities that spur forth from absence. Baglio paints belief as a defiant and unyieldingly shifting tool. The ability to see and facilitate different realities, to come to terms with the truth through a series of tall tales and stories as vast and expansive as absence allows. Baglio is able to fully flesh out these unnamed characters, even subtly addressing notions of class and background, history and circumstance, while journeying us through the earnest thoughts of a boy, trying to fill in the gaps and account for the space where a figure would be.
He does not remember his father, does not remember the man with dark flat eyes, does not remember any father or any man who was ever like a father, and he has come to love this as a kind of freedom he has been gifted.