“Inverrary” by Janice Lee

I used to know this boy who would smile like spring eve.

His cheeks were big chubby cherries and he had a park outside his living room window.

Every day was sun soaked. He stood on the swings until the chains rattled like the tiny whistles adorning

my front door. His white shirt was drenched with windblown sweat, like he was made of entire oceans.

Scraped knees from falling off my scooter often made me cry but he bought me cookie dough ice cream

with the fifty cents he got from his parents. Tongue soothed, I hopped back on ocean seesaws and

strawberry slides, wounds forgotten.

His laughs were bird chortles, not quite symphonies, but yellow enough to float.

He had a large birthmark brown enough to paint his complexion into Matisses. He told me he would get it

removed with a hefty sigh.

He sat with me on the fenced-down edges of the Inverrary tennis court until the sun molded into

dripping red-orange paint, smearing the expanse of sky far above us.

I remember pea-sized mosquito bites growing into swollen kneecaps after scratching too long.

Soon, in mid-summer, we’d both have mosquito bites tracing the lines of our thights

He pushed me on metallic black swings until I was floating into skies, my pink sneakers scrapping cotton

clouds, flying.

He lived in that small white townhouse. Near the park and the tennis court. I fell in love with that dainty

home perfectly still on that grassy hill. The warm night breezes. Catching flitting fireflies.

But one day he was gone. House sold.

He had moved to Korea, or at least that’s what my mom told me.

I still walk up the rolling meadows dressed in sunflowers, all the way up, just to see that house next to

that park.

I sit on swings alone, one seat empty without shadow.

I wonder if he ever found the green scaled dragonfly.

I wonder if he still stands on his swings and laughs when he falls over.

I wonder if he makes more than fifty cents and if he buys someone else ice cream.

Janice Lee is from the suburbs of Chicago, but finds herself back travelling back to her motherland in South Korea every chance she gets for visual inspiration. She spends her free time writing (obviously) and making random Spotify playlists for fun.