Delicate Forehead
By: Alex Z. Salinas
Her mouth—small—was big enough for her large fears, which she’d communicated to him with rapid desperate kisses. She’d told him she’d feared suffering a heart attack since age five, a condition that exasperated her parents. They didn’t believe in anxiety, and he’d only pretended to. He’d almost said: Our parents were born before the Civil Rights Movement, their parents whooped them with tree branches, what’d you expect? He’d go on to publish a collection of poems, Lord, Is She Really Real?, followed five years later by Lord, She Really Ain’t Here, baffling most anyone who’d finished it. In those handful of years between books, he’d lost his folks, the girl and religion, the latter of which occurred the moment he’d accidentally stepped on a grand white moth resting on the welcome mat outside his front door. “Lord,” he’d said, “you trusted me—and I done killed you with eyes wide open.” “Lord,” he’d said, “I done squashed you on autopilot.” His feet had a mind of their own, the twins dragging him to places he’d often regretted. One evening, he’d found in his sock drawer a harmonica gifted to him on his fifth birthday by his estranged aunt, and he’d attempted to play it—attempted attempts at playing it. The sound rattled his teeth, so he’d donated the harmonica and a box of clothes to a church, and before pulling out of the parking lot, he’d closed his eyes and considered all the things worth living for, of which there were plenty, which made him despise himself. When he’d seen across the road the billboard with his old college buddy on it, donning a suit and a grin and pointing at viewers commandingly with the phrase I Got You above his likeness and a 1-800 number below it, he’d felt relieved, having remembered him as affable and dull. To be civilized, he’d thought, is to be affable and dull. “I am,” he’d said, “a thread—a ribbon on an open palm.” He’d clenched his fist and with his knuckles rapped his delicate forehead, behind which his essence was stored in his delicate prefrontal cortex. Things were to bound change. And they did. Oh, how they did.
Alex Z. Salinas lives in San Antonio, Texas. He holds an M.A. in English Literature and Language from St. Mary's University, and is the author of four full-length poetry collections and a book of stories, City Lights From the Upside Down, which was included in the National Book Critics Circle's Critical Notes. In 2025, his debut novel, The Dream Life of Larry Rios, will be published by FlowerSong Press. His stories have appeared in include Every Day Fiction, Red Fez, Mystery Tribune, Points in Case, Ariel Chart and 101 Words.IG | X