short story

Jake had trepidation but allowed me to take the kayak out without him a couple weeks later. We were having what people say “an Indian Summer.” It was sixty nine degrees and he was busy with his new girlfriend and I desperately wanted the respite away from my parents house. I come home to visit them every other month and some days I curl up inside myself in my dead brother’s room. But today, I was strong: rested, full (I had eaten a bowl of oatmeal and two cups of blueberries in the morning and snacked on Cliff bars throughout the trip) and rowing. I was also separated from everyone else, alone on the river. Also four hours in. Also not sure where I was. Also left my phone in the car so it wouldn’t get wet. I marked the passing time with a pink Sharpie; drew a line on my forearm every time I thought an hour passed. Four pink lines. Petrified would be downplaying what I was feeling. When something knocked the boat the first time, I ignored it. I brushed it off as anxiety. You make things up, Lion. Convincing myself it was a current, I paddled on. Keeping my eyes on the tops of trees for sunbathing snakes, I hadn’t looked down to see the depth of the lake or that I was in the middle of a lake or I was so far from everyone and in open water until. I wanted to get away from the snakes.
“You’re obsessed with this drama of a snake falling into your kayak and murdering you.”
“Snakes don’t murder, Jake,” I interrupted again. “They just kill. Don’t be dramatic.”
“Oh, I’m being dramatic, Cat? I’m being dramatic???” he laughed
I was remembering the first time we talked about my phobias near the shore.
“How do you convince someone their house isn’t haunted?”
I was talking to him about the fine line art of “reality testing.”
“Or that they are not haunted?”
I was explaining how to hold two things at once without favor.
“Or that people aren’t watching them?”
It was windy and chilly. We both had bathing suits but sweatpants over them.
“Reality testing is a common practice for people experiencing psychosis in which they talk to another person about the delusion and most people do it with a psychiatrist. BUT,” I suddenly project my voice, eager to keep the attention, “You can also try to test with the person you are having the delusion about but it only works with the person if you get an affirmative answer.”
He was gazing at the waves but engrossed.
“You mean you only believe them if they say yes?”
“YES.”
I dig my toe into the sand.
“Imagine deliberately asking someone if they were stalking you or watching you. You would only believe them if they say yes because otherwise you would always think they are protecting themselves.”
He nodded, looking at me, “That makes sense.”
“So I had a ton of clients that believed their neighbors were spying on them. I could tell them they weren’t but only their neighbors could admit it. And no one would do that. And if they did, then what? Probably exacerbate everything. And in our world, people are being stalked online. So people kind of spiral,” I make that perpetual motion with my hands, “And you don’t get any definitive answers because the truth is we are all being spied on.”
I watch a wave crash.
“It’s not just in our heads. Some people are just really sensitive.”
“Hmm,” he started. “So how would you ever reality test?”
“You don’t. I mean, you try. Bring statistics and probability into it. The likelihood of the TV being directed at you is high because of the way advertising works now, but it’s also not sentient so to break the pattern of thinking electronics are talking to you, you first have to accept they were programmed to cater to your desires, and then to ignore them. But the likelihood of your neighbors watching you is less. Your crush, maybe. An abusive ex, probably. The mailman, unlikely. And the internet is father: always watching.”
“The algorithm,” he said.
I was always talking about the algorithm.
“So anyway, you can’t actually tell me that I don’t owe these ghosts a favor because you can’t tell me that my house isn’t haunted, that I didn’t invite them, that I didn’t communicate with them and ask them for help. Only the ghosts can tell me I don’t owe them anything. Only years can tell me. Only no one can tell me because I would only believe the affirmative. You can’t say no.
“I can’t.”
“No, you can’t.”
We both watched my feet in the sand.
“But I can teach you how to kayak down Alligator River.”
“Yeah.”
We both watched the waves crash and I started guessing with a 98.3% accuracy rate.

We stopped at the pier on the way back to my room, saltwater taffy stuck to our lips and miles to go.
“Remember when we used to race,” he suddenly said.
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
But he was already running.

“I’m obsessed with snakes but not bitten by any snakes so there is that,” I said out loud.
I was in the middle of a lake, far from the bank and I had just felt a bump against the bottom of my kayak. The boat rocked a little to the right but not much and Jake, was right, I am dramatic. It is probably the current. It was probably the current.
“But alligators are moving north through the intercoastal waterway and with climate change they could start settling. We are not far from North Carolina..”
“Ok where did you read that?”
“I Googled it.”
“You purposely Googled it!I told you not to Google anything…”
“Oh, I should just plug my ears and cover my eyes and trust you during alligator season.”
“WHAT? What did you Google?” “Are alligators moving north on…”
“No,” I splashed him with my oar. “I did google that, yes, but I Googled “are there alligators in Virginia?”
“And it said they are moving north.”
“Yep.”
“Lion cub,” he always called me lion cub. “The only thing you have to look out for are snakes falling from the trees.”
He pointed up to show me: a little black rat snake hanging from a cypress just to the right of us. I turned to him and smiled: big with all teeth.
“Cool.”
“Very cool,” he affirmed.

My arms are tired and I am not sure why I didn’t take his advice. He told me not to go out alone and definitely to stick to the route with people.
“I won’t.”
“You drift.”
“I don’t.”
He stared flatly.
“How will you get there? You don’t have a rack.”
“YOUR car. Trade. I just got it detailed and your car smells like dead fish.”
“True.”
He stared again.
“You drift.”
“What else is there to do but drift down No Alligator River?”
He relunctantly handed me his keys and took my freshly cleaned Honda into his driveway. But his intuition was right. I daydreamed, became so obsessed with finding rat snakes in the trees that I lost all sense of direction. I don’t even know what direction I came from. Whimsical. They call me whimsical. And I was whimsically carried downstream and now had to row back to the sides of the lake with the trees while both watching out for snakes and trying to find my path which I felt was behind me, but I’d been wrong before. As I rowed to turn around, I felt my biceps tearing and my calves had already cramped long ago.
“Fuck. I’m tired”
No, I was exhausted. Smiling through exhaustion. My arms were growing and so was my hunger, my impatience, my budding fit of panic trapped in miles of water surrounded by miles of swamp. I felt a push at the bottom of my canoe like a sudden strong current. It’s just the current. Looking to the sides, I tried to calculate if (and only if) I was literally too exhausted to row, could climb up the bank and rest keeping my canoe (borrow, lion cub, I will let you borrow the kayak some days) safely secure at the bottom? It’s hard to tell with the swamp. The bank could contain solid ground or dense thick marsh. I would have to abandon my kayak anyway to climb it and there was no telling what I would fall into. I had nothing to tie it with. Truly, I had no choice but to paddle back, back to where I had seen the three couples earlier getting ready to venture out. I was concerned about my father. No, brush that from your mind.
“I will make it.”
I had eaten everything. It’s true. I have very little impulse control and when I am anxious, my stomach grips itself but when I am hungry, I am voracious and my salivation drives me. The bag next to me was empty and my canteen (I brought two) was down to a quarter of the bottle.
“It’s ok,” I let myself float.
I could not row anymore. I deserved and needed the rest. That’s what started this. It was only three pm. I had a few more hours before it got dark. It was hard for me to relax. In a state of constant hyper vigilance, I tensed every muscle in my body and constantly.
“So everything hurts,” I told him on that first trip.
“Yeah,” he rowed ahead a bit.
“I just want to be prepared.”
“How do you feel today?”
“Oh, fine,” I cheerily responded.
It was easier with him. He had packed extra; extra things that I may not have remembered or ever even thought of at all: peanuts and water and a sweatshirt. My arms hurt. I had goosebumps. I wore loose-fitting pants but a sleeveless top. The sun would go down. My knees were sore. My legs were shaking, the muscles clamping and unclamping slowly but Jake and I laughed a lot. That’s what I’ll remember.
“What will you remember?”
“What the alligator from the dream means.”
“Ah, the alligator dream again. Always the alligator dream.”
He turned around and smiled at me, leading me.
“What does it all mean?”
I let my mind wander.
“You always ask me about it.”
He rowed so he could face me and float backwards while I floated forward.
“And what does it all mean?”
“Sometimes an alligator is just an alligator.”

He caught me gazing up at the trees.
“A lot of times, they won’t even bother you. You may not even notice them.”
“I’ll notice them.”
“Yeah, of course, Cat.”
Jake showed me four snakes that day and I showed him two.
“See?”
“See? I am beating you.”
“Whatever, when I look up I see them. I don’t always look up, sometimes I look down. You can’t always look up. You have to focus”
“True but. Maybe you should look up more.
When it dropped from the branch, I reacted as I always thought I would. With swiftness, I gracefully tumbled over the side leaving my bag but taking the oar. I tumbled. Mildly disoriented, I felt young, the way I felt when I visited the beach with Leana or Alex.
“Look! Look!”
I would jump the small waves in the water to crash into the big waves. I had zero fear as a child, none. In fact, I played in the surf all summer long enjoying the pull; the way a wave will pull you back like the fletching of the arrow to the bow. I was being plucked, ready to launch. I was gliding forward like a seal. I was riding it, one long wave and then above water and thenI was suddenly in the river, wading, the water at my waist. My oar floating gently away and I peeked in the canoe to confirm it was a rat snake. My bag was next to it, placid, both my pack emptied of all food, only a quarter of a canteen of water and it was gray. It was not black like a rat snake but gray like a tree trunk lying lifeless, defenseless and not full of venom. Dead, or never alive, the branch that had scared me right out of the boat. Sometimes an alligator is just an alligator. Sometimes a branch is just a branch.
“What was the last thing you said?”
“When?”
Jake coughed, “In your dream. I remember you saying sometimes you were trying to figure out if it was a crocodile or an alligator but you said something too.”
I turned slowly to see it’s two eyes and briefly it’s wide open even-toothed smile before it ducked.
“In the dream?”
Before I was pulled.
“No, just now.”
“Oh.”
I was twisted over and over like the way a wave will catch you in the surf and tumble you, keep it’s watery fingers on you.
“I told you the alligators were moving North.”
My lungs were full of water and just freshly out of breath.
“No, what was the last thing you said, Cat. Before you saw its jaws?”
I was feeling perpetual motion.
I said, “Oh, I said it would be either be a snake or an alligator.”
I was feeling my left hip disconnect from my waist.

“The Dream of Alligator River”

May 12, 2020 0

She put her makeup on slowly. She wanted it to be correct. Never quite flawless, she was more adept at wearing graceful missteps to humanize herself in public. Tonight, she moved slowly. She paid attention to the brow bone, the jaw line, her full lips, all of her best features. She stopped applying the powder to stare. The blush she chose was dark; a shimmering burgundy that ran across her face and cheekbones in the shape of a bruise– untidy but organic. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear examining the soft, honey waves falling over her shoulders first as they moved with her fingers, with the light twist of her neck, and then again as they settled over her clavicle. She wanted to see what she looked like as she approached in stillness and in motion.

“That took too much time,” she said out loud.

Moving her head back and forth in a slow no gesture to see what she looked like disagreeing, she could feel and see the skin of her lips cracking. She eyed the chapstick on the shelf but wet her lips with her tongue instead. We must move on. There was nothing she did for anyone without motive and no one was around to touch them yet. Setting the bamboo brush on the sink, she ignored her dry mouth and unyielding thirst to pick up the mascara. Carefully, she applied the wand to the eyelashes of her left lid and then immediately stopped to examine herself again. Unbundled and free, her thoughts had been leaping ahead of her. They were constant, persistent and biting. Sometimes they were mean. You will never make it. It was distracting. They were being seized by something else (you will never make it); something distant, either imaginary or future she could never tell, but something tugging at her sleeve. Look behind you. She stopped applying the mascara to reach for the twisted, plastic straw from the sink’s ledge and began twirling it in her fingers on instinct. Letting herself be overtaken by the fake memory; the fake way he held her, the fake way he smiled, the fake way it felt, she felt the rush in her chest.

“Stop it,” she barked at herself.

Staring at the mirror once more, she held her own gaze in trance.

“My name is Catarina Kacurek,” she practiced again.

She said it a couple more times out loud until she was satisfied with the way it felt rolling off her tongue. Naturally. Nodding, she put the straw back on the ledge and began to apply the mascara to the right lid’s eyelashes. It’s always like this. She couldn’t see the clock in the bedroom and was thankful. I’m late, she knew. Taking her time anyway, she could still feel the electric bubble running up her spine underneath to announce its arrival, announce its bones were growing over her bones into a grove of wands. I have things to do. She set the mascara neatly back in her makeup bag and pulled out the eyeliner. Dragging the skinny black pencil across the top of her left lid first, she felt a breeze, a draft from a hidden place to the left of her. As she fawned over herself inside, pretending he was next to her complimenting her as she coyly licked the cherry gloss from her lips, she let him praise the way her eyes grew from small and doting to big and black and full of infirmity. She let him kiss her cheek and she closed her eyes to feel it, his light kiss that held no real urgency. She felt his lips part near the corner of her mouth. She could feel his tongue poke out a little as she turned to meet him before she heard a car backfire a few blocks over. Goosebumps trickled up both arms. He was gone and she was gone too. She opened her eyes to see the pencil was now in the drain in a pool of tiny drops of water. In her spine, her bone grove of smoke and scream and sudden life, she felt it. She stared at the pencil, now damp, not ruined but damaged like everything she owned. He was not with her in the bathroom. He was not with her. To clear her throat, her desert dry throat that desperately needed attention, she let out a tiny cough. She came back to life.

“My name is Catarina Kacurek,” she began, facing the mirror.”May I come in?”

She held it there, in her reflection, her dirty blonde and olive complexion not unlike her original self but twisted, distorted slightly like the way it feels when you finally see yourself without a mirror. You’ve been looking at yourself backwards. She was looking at herself angled her whole life; angled smirk, angled eyebrow lift, angled posture. Manicured and yearning and looking more nubile lately, she began wetting her lips again with her tongue. Her lips tasted like plastic fruit and she laughed aloud to see her smile lines so she could once again hide them when the time was right. She laughed aloud and the car backfired again but she expected it now. Her spine grew. She let herself feel the backfire of every other thing in the distance.

April 10, 2019 0

At 7:30, I am dry and dressed. The gown is long and flowing: burgundy, velvet, full sleeves with an obtuse triangle cut down the back. The entire back is exposed except for one thin strip that is hung at the top between my shoulder blades. My back is my best feature. It is taut and strong and firm. It is the mask I wear as I walk away from everyone. I am playing with the corded belt that separates the bottom from the top and twirling for the antique mirror I lug everywhere I go. Nodding, an ok is all I can manage. That is better than usual.

. Teasing my hair in a way that flatters the right side of my face, for about six minutes, I stare at my profile from different angles. This is incredibly frustrating to me. My hair is naturally messy and I want to “figure it out.” I want you to see me a certain way when you see me. Ok, I say again. Everything I do is rehearsed. I move my bangs back to the front and let the hair fall as it may; in waves to the top of my shoulder. It is thinner than it looks, auburn when there is sun.

“I am the great illusionist,” I hold my arms out in front the oval mirror and form an old-timey overdrawn smile, the way carnival workers grin to lure someone into their games. It is wide and sickly. This is for my own enjoyment. “The magician and her gown.”

I twirl one more time admiring the dress and then I return to my makeup bag to apply my mascara slowly. The weed makes everything take longer than it naturally should. I don’t look at the clock because for once I forget and I have nowhere to be tonight. I am dressing up to get in an accident. I want you to take this in slowly. I apply my eyeliner slowly. I have nowhere to be tonight. I pucker my lips. I am dressing up to get in an accident. I close my eyes and open them suddenly. When I open my eyes, I want you to see everything including my long wet lashes fluttering like drops of lighting at your doorstep. If there is anything I want you to remember, it is everything about me.

I’m stoned and I decide to drive. It’s irresponsible and I don’t do it often, but it’s a blizzard and I am wearing combat boots underneath my gown. This makes me feel rebellious and thoughtful. Sometimes I pretend I am carrying a pocket knife at my side. I picture it emblazoned with the name Hecate down one side and the great herself on the other; her three heads and two snarling dogs at her feet ready to enter the night. I grab my side sometimes when I walk past groups of men as if I am getting ready to pull it out and slice their little fingertips. Just for fun, I giggle in the thought which makes me laugh in real life as I am passing one of the only other people out walking on the street. He catches me. Nothing makes me feel safe.

“I am a sociopath,” I say out loud to the snowfall and the man keeps walking.

At 8pm, I am sitting inside of my car as it is warming listening to Jeff Buckley because it is good and depressing and I am in constant turmoil. Music delivers what men have always promised but couldn’t: an expansive climactic escape. As it heats, I stare at my reflection in the rearview. The blush is too heavy but my eye makeup is light so I feel balanced. I slowly apply the lip balm before I apply the lipstick I bought to match my dress. My lips are desert dry and I am thirsty.

“Fucking marijuana,” I chirp in a sing song voice and reach for the console blindly.

I take a giant gulp from my canteen and savor the cold water on my tongue. It’s like I’ve been eating sand. I stare at the green ring around my pupil.

“You’re a narcissist, Cat.”

“Does that also make me a sociopath?”

“You just want to be crazy! You just like to malinger for attention. You want everyone’s attention all of the time.”

“Malinger, Jay, that’s a good one. Were you reading my diary again?”

“You’re cruel. Everything you say is barbed or loaded. You’re such a fucking bitch sometimes.”

“Maybe I’m a sociopath, babe. Maybe you’re lucky it’s only words that hurt your itty bitty baby feelings. Maybe you should be grateful I don’t rip you to shreds in your sleep with my teeth.”

I continue to apply the eyeliner and listen to the front door slam.

“1…2…”

“You know what, Catarina,” Jay throws the door back open.

“Fucking clockwork,” I exit the bathroom to greet him with a full face and tooth.

At 8:20, I am sitting in my car filled with fear. You’re stoned. There is no reason to be afraid but I am. This is how premonition works. It takes over and starts to drive. It repeats the feeling you will have when the time hits. This is instinct. Many people ignore gut feelings and those people waste my time. I know what a chiming church bell symbolizes. I know what a year turning means. I know I am an hourglass. I am a wilting forest. I am going to be late for something and on time for something else. It is 8:21 pm when I begin driving.

I am one of the only cars on the road. Everyone else is an Uber driver. In protest, I refuse to take an Uber in bad weather. It’s mean and even though they will get paid a lot, I am always afraid that what I carry with me in my hand will be dealt with them. What a senseless death. Unless, of course, it awakens that person to trust their gut in their next life. I snicker.

“I am not a REAL sociopath,” I say out loud to the rearview trying not to spend any more time lost in the reflection.

No, this is between me and God. I don’t feel high but I am driving 2 miles an hour and openly talking to myself with vigor. This is not that unusual except the same conversation is replaying over and over which concerns me. Oh, that little tug about instinct and remorse. Sometimes one begets the other.

Why don’t you tell me again?

I told you already.

No, in linear order.

WHAT THE FUCK IS LINEAR ORDER?

It doesn’t work. I’m shaking. I’m tense. I have to drive over the bridge and it’s a snowstorm and I’m slightly stoned. Fuck. Why did I choose to wear such a ridiculous outfit? The light is turning yellow and there is no turn on red on Spring Garden. I am relieved but there are cars pulling up behind me. I turn on some music. It is slow and long and sullen. What is this? A playlist I made called Space. It’s not soothing but I don’t change it. My reaction time is slow and unusual. I am in a trance. I am in a trance in a car moving over the bridge that will tumble right in front of me. I am in a trance in my car driving over the bridge. I am in a trance at the next light waiting to get on the interstate. Then I snap out of it.
“Thank you God,” I say out loud.

I have driven over the bridge with incredible speed, or without any memory of it. I start telling myself a story so I’ll continue the game. Once, when I was younger, a small girl, I went to my mother for comfort. I said, mom, I can’t seem to make friends. She said, Catarina, you’re a bully. I said, that’s not it. She said, I’ve seen the way you talk to Leana. You treat her like she’s your servant. I said, that’s not it! Except I screamed it. She said, you never let anyone finish saying anything. I said, I’m trying to finish something now and you won’t fucking listen. She said, you are a precocious bitch and you will not talk to me like that. I said, that’s not all I am, and I slammed the door so hard that a picture fell and broke in her room. She stormed out and chased me with a notebook and slapped me across the face. It was the only time she hit me. I may have deserved it. There are many parts of the story that I left out. More importantly, that was the last time I tried to open that conversation. I sulked for days, resentful, embarrassed that I was worth hitting. I had never been hit. I had been touched, but I had never been hit. My resolve changed after that. I knew what it felt like to have someone use force against you; power, braun, words. I had none of that. I was only about nine or ten years old. My defenses were down. I think I played Kirby’s Adventure alone in my room for a week straight. I didn’t call Leana even though she called me. I didn’t watch TV with my brother or ask to play double on Mario Kart. I didn’t even go outside. It was summer and I was sulking and opening the darkest part of myself inside of my own mind.

Without noticing, I am in a different neighborhood and I am I losing control. Not of the wheel, but with my whole body. I start to panic. I start to shake. I understand the thing I am dreading is happening. I decide to turn down a random street and then another random street so I am far away from other headlights. I don’t want anyone else involved. I am shaking and whatever Brian Eno Hammock soothing devil mix I made in an attempt to quell my bloodlust at an earlier moment is backfiring and I feel like I am on Mars as the car careens across the street and immediately crashes into a brick wall. It’s weird what we protect in panic. I let go of the wheel to lean into the crash and immediately grab the locket hanging around my neck.

September 10, 2018 0

At 5:30 pm, I am in the bath. Winters I spend immersed in bath. Tonight, it is chamomile and yarrow oil and a sprinkle of angelica root. I have been having some superstitious tendencies again so I add my Nana’s rosary to the windowsill next to me, a hunk of tourmaline on the shelf that holds my razor and shampoo, and a rose quartz at the bottom of the tub. This will make it worse. I snap my head towards the blow of air beside me but I settle. There’s nothing there. Baths soothe my gnawing winter madness. Some call it depression or “seasonal affective disorder.” You’re sad, Cat. I don’t know what to really call it but nothing could be worse than this.

“Did you take your prozac? he asks from the kitchen.

I dug my nails into the sofa. My hair was combed. My lips were not chapped.

“Yes,” I responded immediately. “Everything should be all right now.”

Resentful, I sat on the edge of the couch prepared to jump up at any moment and leave if I ever could grow the guts. It was the mostly mocking tone I had grown so accustomed to hearing that triggered my bottled rage. The medicine created a tense space between us and left me feeling like a new baby well of sorrow was building somewhere deep inside of me, but I couldn’t empty it. Mechanisms related to crying had disappeared or been stifled somewhere in the bottom of a trunk I had no access to; had lost the key or motor skills to turn the lock so I just let it fill without my knowledge. It sat fat in its vicious growth, plump with previous insult, previous assault or terror, ready to spill over if I had the wherewithal to sharpen my nails and eviscerate my body; suffocate him with the bile that spilled out, or the precious bottle of antidote, or the pillow I keep between us and grip daily for comfort. I’m a tepid lunatic that never grows to boil. Devoid of feeling, but going through the motions, I was sitting eerily still waiting for dinner. I was wearing a pink and purple striped sundress that tied in the back. I was wearing lip gloss to match. My purse was already on my arm and I had pinned a stray hair back with a blue and green caterpillar clip a girlfriend had given me to remind who I was, and mostly, I was trying not to check the time as I waited for the years to pass by.

My bottom lip is under water before I realize I am sinking in the midst of another flashback. I shoot up with fake alarm. I will never drown like this, but I am stoned, I remind myself. Better to be careful than feed your ghost regret. What is this? I look around my delusive tomb in horror. Lit with more than a dozen votives: all white and tall and leaving flecks of wax all over everything, the room smells faintly of fresh linen but it is a manufactured smell; plastic, not the way most fresh linen smells. My sheets smell blank. There was more than that too: lavender incense wafting from the dresser in the bedroom, the ylang-ylang that permanently coats the sides of the tub, and the faint remnant of vinegar from where I tried to scrub the spots off the mirror with my homemade glass solution. I am over stimulated. Wildly stoned and always coming back to myself in the middle of the same thought: maybe that’s where these hallucinations start, I feel uncomfortable. The voice from my bowels is starting again. Goosebumps dot my shoulder and I regret not making a fresh Earl Gray before I got in. Loscil is playing in the background from my bed and I want it louder. I want someone there to help with these things and I can’t tell you how long I sit upright in a fetal position contemplating that thought. I keep no clock in the bathroom. I desperately need the respite.

Sinking back to let my head rest on the peeling ceramic, I sigh loudly in a way that tells the world, Nevermind, I am alone and I’m ok today. I’m going to make it. There is a way out, and I inhale deeply the green grass dotted by gray ash from the glass bowl I placed next to my nana’s rosary and I say to no one:

“I need help.”

This is fine. There is something about water that is so soothing to me. My whole life has been spent in water. As a child, my summers were spent outside with the Dyson sisters at the community pool; getting tan and bracing the high dive, guessing which lifeguards liked each other, giggling, showing the boys the banana Now-n–Laters stuck to our teeth. If it wasn’t the pool, it was at the beach chasing ghost crabs, learning how to body surf with Alex, being pulled under everytime and miraculously standing to survive, the top of my bathing suit always twisted to expose one nipple before I realized. I was always keeping an eye on Alex from some distance. Even at the pool, in my accidental glow and popularity, he in his awkward pallid skin, we sometimes were distant but never separate. I always kept an eye on him. Some days my legs were beat by jellyfish, my toes were sore from broken shells, cut and pinched my crabs, but I always went back in. During storms, I scoured the block in the pouring rain looking for bugs or just letting the water baptize me. Even as a child, I showered whenever I was upset and the thundering tantrum couldn’t cut it, I needed a warm cleanse. In adolescence, baths replaced those as I needed more time to mourn the interminable unrequited love that I continually faced as my hormones grew into teeny monsters to match the teeny breasts that baited them closer. I hit that budding menses stage and sobbed into the pink drain at my bad luck; a woman?!?! Everyone hates women.

My mom called me a little water bug and those didn’t bother me either. I played tidal wave with the beetles that flew into our kiddie pool. I ducked dragonflies, watched them skim the tops of the water in the ditch when we played house in my backyard. I spent hours in the rain plucking worms from their hiding places; under bricks in neighbors’ gardens, my legs caked in mud as I walked back with a handful to feed to Michaelangelo, our alligator snapping turtle. I never avoided puddles, I jumped right into them. Water was my sanctuary.

“You’re filthy, Catarina!” my mother would scream as I traipsed the wilderness all over our kitchen floor on the way to the tank, letting twigs drop from my knees.

“Look, Alex!” I would ignore her to drop a handful of worms near Mike’s head so he saw them instantly.

The two of us would stand over him in awe as he quickly, with uncanny precision, devoured each one right after the other, little particles of flesh floating to the top. I pressed my palms together to stay grounded in the excitement.

“Get in the shower when you’re done!” my mom shrieked pointing at me.

“Mom, look,” Alex pointed as I rolled my eyes.

“Cool,” Alex would say and I nodded.

I splash the top of the water for my own enjoyment, letting the daydreams take back over, another Cheshire Cat smile spreading wide across my face. The weed was devouring every synapse. One summer, I had a sprained ankle. Who knows where I got it; probably doing gymnastics in the backyard, showing off, proving I was the best at something I was clearly a novice at, but I tumbled. My mom wrapped it carefully in an ace bandage for me. Some hot day, we went to a party near a lake with their friends and their friends’ kids. No one packed a bathing suit for me because I wasn’t supposed to swim with my impairment but once everyone jumped into the water, I was immediately forlorn.. My parents really couldn’t take my tantrums for more than a few seconds and I knew this was no place for screaming, that would lead to too much embarrassment. I had to beg.

Consumed by jealousy, I began,“Please please please please please please please please pleeeeease, please pleeeeeaase.” I repeated like that to my mom and began to hop on one foot. “I am fiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Loooook, fiiine. Fine fine fine.”

My mother frowned.

“I’ll watch her Linn,” my dad, fun drunk hero, interrupted before she could remind me of the agreement and I began to quickly hobble and quickened the hobble to a half run, still in red sundress, still with barrettes in hair to the edge of the lake. I started wading to catch up to my new friends on the back of their dad’s raft before my mom could even consider an outfit for me to put on instead of the dress.

“Look, mom,” I shouted already caught up to the others. “I’m fine! I am using my right leg! I won’t drown!” I splashed for effect to show her I was the best swimmer out there.

My mom waved. I waved back. It was that perfect time of day in summer. Everyone had the day off. Everyone had eaten and drank their fill of wine coolers. The kids had plenty of soda and time to run around the house. We were settling but still excited; had worked some of that nervous energy out. The sun was beginning it’s journey to set casting a yellow glow over the entire surface of the water and everyone was happy. I was in the water and everyone was happy. I was not alone.

I shoot up again with that thought. You’re stoned. I am stoned and sinking into the water again. I run my hands over my wet head and curl back into my upright fetal position to watch the nearest flame wink.

“It’s so hard to stay present,” I say to the empty apartment.

Tapping my fingers on top of the water to watch the ripples, I pretend the noises it makes are from someone else. Someone else’s hand on top of the water. Someone else’s eyes doused in flame reflecting back to me,“Have you ever tried telling anyone about your fear of drowning?”

Fuck. The imaginary man handing me the hot Earl Gray is right. I am lonely.

September 9, 2018 0