The Gribble Took My Name

by Al Ryanne Gatcho

The Gribble came in wetlight. Slorping through the cracks. Furling under the doormat. Ma said not to open my mouth when it passed or it’d root behind your tongue.

Too late. My tongue speaks words I don’t know.

Afterward, my name tasted wrong. Chalky. Like a word scraped from bone. I tried to tell Ma, but she just blinked slow and said, “Who’s that now?” She was already frumpled, her voice half-braided. The Gribble had fingered through her syllables weeks ago.

That night I slept with a spoon under my tongue, hoping it would anchor me. The Gribble loves soft-mouthed children. Ones who lilt when they ought to bite.

At school, they called roll. I froze when they didn’t even pause at mine. The name they said—it had too many elbows. It jangled. Wasn’t mine.

I raised my hand. “That’s not me,” I said.

The teacher—Miss Blat—smiled. Or maybe bared. “Names are just hats,” she said. “Wear what fits.”

But I remembered. I remembered the way my name curled when Mama used it in lullaby. The breath behind the note.

I wrote it down that night. Five times. Then backward. Then inside out. But the Gribble came through the ink.

It bubbled. It blinked.

“Give it back,” I told it. “Give me me.”

The Gribble hrrrm’d. It had a voice like Velcro and meat. “You were never the only one in that skin. You just thought you were.”

I tried to scream but I only buzzed.

Now I speak in gruntknots. Friends call me Blur. I don’t correct them. I eat salt to remember the shape of my teeth.

Sometimes I dig in the garden and find things: thumbprints, breath, a half-word I once wept. I collect them in a jar. I write poems in Gribbletongue.

Ma claps when I read them. Her hands are backwards now, but she means it.

There’s a boy down the street. Still soft. Still named. I watch him from the porch and whisper my name into the dirt, just to hear it die clean.

The Gribble purrs at my feet. I don’t mind anymore. It lets me speak, so long as I don’t try to mean. But every so often, when the wetlight bends, I remember. I remember. And it flinches.

Al Ryanne Gatcho left the Philippines to teach EFL in China and write stories in the quiet hours. His work has appeared in anthologies of short fiction and poetry. He is currently working on his first collection of short stories.