LGBTQIA MINI-STORIES
Sebastian Walks: To Stand Just Like Dad #002
JaQ, a gender-fluid girl, becomes curious about her father and mimics him
A mini-story about a gender-fluid girl, named JaQ, who discovers their dominant voice — Sebastian. Each story starts with a question and sometimes ends with an answer.
002 — To Stand Just Like Dad
Why does he pee like that?
Curiosity raged like a parched forest fire that early morning. As my father stood bare naked in the bathroom, he mindlessly relieves himself, unaware that his sleepy-eyed child was standing behind the cracked sliding bathroom door.
I did not know we were so different.
So, that’s how he pees.
Later that day, my mom takes me along to the nail shop, our weekend ritual. She gets her nails done, and I wander around the shop, bored out of my mind. The nail shop was an experience.
The smells of acrylic chemicals, the drill-like nail sanding tool was screaming in fragmented rhythms. The nail paint colors, dancing Vietnamese tones of chatter, soap opera melodramas in the background, and mixed of sister-girl gossip chatter. None of it, interesting, to me.
There was a long, dark hallway with a half-cracked door at its end. My curiosity took root, and my eyes locked in on the soft light bleeding from the door and the sun-lit dust particles dancing, even floating, between the shoulder-width walls.
In my child’s mind, I quickly flipped this dingy, unadorned hallway into a make-believe enchanted world. I was the super-hero about to discover the unknown when I stepped into that lit end of the hall. The dancing dust particles became tiny fairies.
The half-cracked door became the lip of a cave. The smooth linoleum floor, where I walked along, became a forest floor. I was in a new, pretend world. The nail shop behind me, gone. My adventures had begun.
The door had two funny stick character logos. One had a triangle shape; the other did not. As I pushed open the door, my eyes immediately gravitated to the porcelain urinal to my right. I immediately remembered my father from earlier that morning.
In standing and facing the urinal, I dropped my pants. My equipment was a bit different, but I instinctively guided my finger to my flesh, in an attempt to guide my urine onto the soaked-blue scented bar resting at the base of the urinal.
No luck.
Urine drained down my leg and formed a yellow puddle around my feet.
This super-hero needed to get cleaned up.
Read previous stories here.
Thanks for reading. Shay lives in Virginia Beach. She currently serves in the U.S. Army by day and devotes the evenings and weekends to writing, videography, and podcasting. Shay is an up-and-coming podcast creator of the storytelling podcast Crack This ShXt Open!, launching in Fall 2020.
