Mr. Green

1 Comment 01 November 2011

but isn’t it weird to see him as a young man trying to show off?
he was one of us once

Doesn’t that make you feel better?

It was Daniel and Sonja and me

I was looking at Daniel, Daniel looked at Sonja and then at the screen and Sonja
was looking at this stick of celery she was eating

She’s one of those people who eat in really small bites
made an awful lot of noise
I didn’t like her.

She and I never had too much to do with each other.

She was there because Daniel had invited her and Daniel was there because I’d invited him and I was there because it was my day off and instead of going out to the beach and celebrating I didn’t have to spend six hours of my life stacking up cans I stayed home, with a broken air conditioner, watching YouTube videos with a lawnmower and a window shopper

this is your life after high school when after high school there’s no college

what did you want to be when you grew up?

he was talking to me

I told him I wanted to be a vet

but I was lying
I’d never wanted to be anything
that’s why when I became nothing
no one was surprised

I asked him what he wanted to be

he said an architect, but he gave up on it because he could never spell it right

Sonja wanted to be a nutritionist
She was the only one of us
of everyone I knew really

who was going to school
nibbling a carrot
kept the rabbit food inside a pink tupperware with white chibi bunnies on the
sides

I remembered that one time

I was eating corn with a spoon from a can I’d snatched from the store, and kid sister, the one with collarbones that collect water, she sat in front of me and very concerned, she told me, you do know corn makes you fat, don’t you?

I thought Daniel was a pretty one

I invited him home one hot day with one purpose in mind and he shows up with
another girl

I wanted to feel something other than boredom
well, I was annoyed now

Looking at him and how his skin beads with sweat
looking at him looking at Sonja

Eating carrots and tomatoes and celery sticks
so much noise you can barely listen to
John Green in the background showing off his plumage

think of a small rabbit

are you sure you wanna fuck that?

well, yeah, apparently so
I stuck my head out the window
wind blew on my face
imagined I was a model with a wind machine
imagined golden eyelids and a pixie face
imagined I had a future and I was someone else
meanwhile
in the background
Daniel was going

oh my god

this guy

he was one of us

Photo Source: Swift Produce

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Atticus Review: Moving On - November 1, 2011
[...] “Mr. Green” by Jazmín Oña is the kind of flash fiction I don’t see often enough—one that combines elements of a poem and prose, and makes it look like of course that was the only choice for the piece. It starts mid-sentence, which gives the narrative instant momentum. The choppy lines give the precise details more visibility without bogging the story down, and the structure also gives insight to the narrator’s thought process so that the words don’t have to do all the work when showing how people move on from each other. [...]