Dear Estranger

Matthew Salesses
· in ,

I’ll never send this. I’m writing it on my phone from a cafe, looking out at the same beach in one of Grandma’s old photos from her childhood. I am sure it is the same because I have to believe. An old woman who could be Grandma walks past, in a group of old women who could be her, all of them in track suits, pumping their arms as if to punch out the present. They point at me and call, American. No, I am making that up. They are on the other side of glass—them and the beach and the gulls circling a boy with thin worm-like snacks. The boy runs under the umbrellas. Thousands of umbrellas crowd the sand, so that a person could almost be faceless there. They say the hill on the far side of the beach where expensive restaurants are built for the sunset is in the shape of a cow. That is something you would laugh about. The recognition in these wide Korean faces of something animal, white and domesticated. The boy has disappeared, and you wouldn’t know where he was except by the call of the gulls, un-tricked, following his hunger.
Your Son

Matthew Salesses is the author of the novels The Hundred Year Flood and I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying. He has written for NPR, The New York Times, Salon, The Toast, Glimmer Train, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the fiction editor at The Good Men Project, online fiction editor at Gulf Coast, and a PhD candidate in the the UH Creative Writing Program.