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  • ISSUE 4

Zacc Dukowitz

6/22/2014

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“Come here,” our camp counselor said. “All of you guys.” His name was Joe and he
smelled like cigarettes. We crowded around him in the middle of the cabin, squeezing together and leaning our heads forward. I was twelve years old, and this was my first summer at camp.

 “Do you know what an oral fixation is?” Joe said.

 Most of us shook our heads no. Eli said, “Well, I’ve seen one once, but . . .”

 “Shut up,” Joe said. “You don’t know. That’s OK,” he said, and we all relaxed a little. “I’m going to show you, but you have to promise”—he looked us each in the eye, all five of us, one at time—“you have to promise that you won’t tell Michael. Deal?”

 We nodded vigorously. Deal.

 “An oral fixation is when you can’t stop touching your mouth. It’s like, you’re obsessed with your mouth.”

 “My little brother has that,” Eli said.

 “He’s probably a baby though, right?”

 Eli shrugged.

 “What I’m talking about is when older kids do it. Just wait. Tonight, after lights

out, you guys pretend to go to sleep and then I’ll turn on my flashlight and show you.

But remember—don’t tell Michael.”

On the way out of the dining hall after dinner Michael caught up to Steve, my best

friend at camp, and me.

“Hey guys,” he said, panting. Like most fat kids, Michael was always a little out

of breath. Michael also had to be the only kid named Michael who didn’t just go by

Mike. His parents were weird, was what everyone said. His mother wrote poetry that

she published herself in little books and had hair down to her butt, and his dad wore a

beret all the time—even when he showered, some of the kids said.

 “What do you think, Sam,” Michael said, turning to me, “do you want to go for a

ghost hunt in the woods tonight?”

 “I don’t know. I think we might just go to bed early,” I said, nudging Steve.

 “Oh yeah,” Steve said. He reached his hands up, stretching. “I’ve been feeling so

tired today.”

 “Yeah,” I said, stifling a yawn. “Really tired.”

 “Whatever,” Michael said. “If you guys don’t want to hang out with me, you can

just say it.”

And he huffed on ahead before we could reply.

 After lights out I waited in the dark for what seemed like a long time. An owl

hooted in the woods. I could hear the other kids breathing steadily in their bunks and I

wondered if maybe the whole thing was off—if maybe the joke was on us for thinking

something was going to happen. Maybe even the joke was just on me, and when Joe’s

flashlight came on everyone would be gathered around my bunk, pointing and laughing at

me. The longer I waited in the dark the more this seemed like a real possibility, and I

began to imagine I could hear them rustling around my bed, could see them gathering

above me, preparing themselves for my humiliation. For what reason I couldn’t have told

you. I was twelve, and the idea of everyone conspiring to make fun of me was a constant

fear I had.

Finally, a flashlight clicked on. The yellow beam swept through the darkness--

passing me, thankfully—and landed on a strange scene. It took me a moment to

understand what I was seeing. There were white flurries over an open mouth . . . fingers,

chubby white fingers moving over Michael’s open mouth, the silver of his braces glinting

while the fingers like engorged silver fish worked in steady crazy patterns over the small

black hole of his mouth. I did not see a tongue. The flashlight held steady as Michael,

deeply asleep, moved his hands over his lips, his teeth, touching his mouth in a way that

suggested a deep self-interest—a deep fascination with his own body—that made me

uncomfortable.

 After a few minutes the yellow beam swept across the room to shine under Joe’s

face, like people hold it when they tell scary stories.

“And that, my boys, is what you call an oral fixation,” Joe said in a deep voice,

then clicked the flashlight off.

 The next morning Steve pulled me aside on the way to breakfast

 “That was super weird last night,” he said, looking around to make sure no one

else could hear us.

 “For sure,” I said. “I can’t believe Michael does that.”

 Steve gave me a look.

“No, I mean, it was weird that Joe showed us.”

“It was just a joke.”

 “I don’t think it was very cool of him. I mean, it’s that guy’s job to protect us,

right?”

 “It was just Michael. That kid’s so weird—who cares about him anyway?”

 “You don’t have to be friends with him to see that it’s not cool what Joe did,”

Steve said. He stepped back, shaking his head, and ran on ahead to breakfast without me.

 After that Steve and I drifted apart. We’d been fast friends, but then, just as

fast—faster even—we weren’t friends any more. And that was that.

*

 That’s how it happened. How I remember it, anyway. For a long time I forgot all

about that night. It was just a small incident from my childhood, after all. But ever since

I turned fifty I’ve started having these nightmares that feature Michael’s mouth, that

small, black hole with silver glinting inside it. My ex-wife crawls from the hole and

shakes her finger at me. My eldest son, who has not spoken to me in over a decade,

walks slowly out of it, his head hanging down in disappointment. Even my dead dog

whimpers from in there, dragging the frayed leash that broke one day, allowing him to

run into the path of a teenager’s charging pickup.

But I don’t feel guilty, when I wake up from these dreams. I don’t feel remorse

for the way I’ve lived my life—the way I treated Michael, and everything that came after.

What I feel is relief. Actually, relief isn’t strong enough. I feel redemption, when I wake

up. Saved, is what I feel. Because I can still remember how terrified I was, lying there in

the dark with only the owl hooting outside, imagining I could hear my tormentors

gathering around me. And how glad, how terribly happy I felt when the flashlight finally

clicked on, and it was pointing at someone else, and not at me.


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    Bio

    Zacc Dukowitz holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida. His fiction has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Every Writer’s Resource, and is forthcoming in the American Literary Review.  He currently lives on Lake Atitlan in rural Guatemala with his wife and two dogs Scout and Boo Radley.  

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