"You Are My Sunshine" • Gene Autry (by Marco Visciolaccio)

The Yalu River’s a wiggler. On the Chinese side, asphalt follows each bank’s serpentine curve like it’s stepping to, fro, keeping time with its North Korean partner. Crank a window down. Rest your head on the back of your palms, and breathe deep that rainwater earth. Reeks sweet like circumnavigating the Okeechobee in Mom’s Range Rover and you haven’t returned her calls. She’ll kill you for running up the odometer. For being somewhere you shouldn’t be, doing something you shouldn’t ought to be doing.

“You Are My Sunshine,” by Gene Autry plays on the radio. It’s your bed-time song. Your heartrate climbs. The North Korean border and the ditty your Mom used to whisper, as the driver taps along to the bridge. He hums but a little too high an octave, since he’s scaled to the Chinese fiddle. You need a smoke. You tear open another carton of cigarettes from the glove compartment.

The driver asks what the song means. What it means is that you broke the singular fundamental rule and told your mother you’re up to something you should’ve only told your father. There’s three new voicemails and you don’t have the guts to even read their transcriptions.

It’s a drinking song, you reply, which is the honest-to-God, massaged truth.

Good idea, he says.

There’s fish camps on the Yalu, like off the St. Johns in Florida. You pull up. Lines sit slack. The fishermen wear trucker caps and the beer’s cold. Plastic chairs cycle border guard keisters and half-spent cigarettes. This vodka tastes like you’re fifteen and vulnerable, your nostalgia defined by red plastic cups and pushing envelopes. A pontoon pulls up, too, from the other side of the river. Folks, soldiers, ramble, on, off. Nothing fazes you except the thought of your mother stepping onto the dock to catch you there, mid-smoke, against the rules, drinking with the boys (North Korean), until sunset.

Before you high-tail it out, there’s an urge to wave goodbye to them across the river, all those disembarked farmers, all those guys your age with their rusted Kalashnikovs slouching against the sunset. You want to grip the carton of cigs like a football. Get a good few steps. Hail Mary it to the opposing riverbank. You could, with the right angle. Maybe they’d enjoy the All-American gesture. Maybe it’d get rid of the evidence. You tease the cigarette holes in your collar and think up excuses for why you’re hopelessly the way you are.

Marco Visciolaccio is an author in Asheville, North Carolina. He edits Flash Fiction for French Broads Lit, a publication focused on authors in Southern Appalachia. He yearns for the unsolicited email. Website: visciolaccio.com