S

he’s having a dream – that she’s eating a fish.

The fish is a big, gleaming, saltwater tuna, laid out in front of her on a wooden table, laid out uncooked and pink, with its scales pulled back from just one side and its fatty pink flesh carved up before her. It’s carved up intricately, in serious designs with incredible detail. Innumerable miniature ridges and folds that, from a distance, form clear patterns and designs – symbols spilled across the rigid flesh of the tuna fish.

But as she picks and eats away at its salty flesh, the detailed carvings on the fish become blurry and sawed, the intricate patterns become less and less apparent. She loses interest in deciphering the symbols. She is interested in consuming the fish. It is delicious – the best fish she has ever had.

•          •          •

She wakes up slowly. She is less waking up than falling out of her dream, with the same dizzy spiraling feeling she had when she fell asleep. Her dream dissolves in black dots and she spins into a shallower darkness.

She lies for a while, in denial, trying not to sense, not to feel, paddling down against the buoyancy of consciousness. 

•          •          •

The first thing she realizes is the heat. It is hot, too hot for comfort, and she is sticky with sweat and swollen with sunburn. Her body is paralyzed and her eyes and mouth refute any motivation to open. Hard sunlight jabs through the dark of her eyelids, projecting dancing mandalas of orange and red on the dark black film of her eyelids.

She lets her hands wander the sandy dock beneath her, cautious for tapering splinters of dry dock wood and blunted, rusting nails. She lets her hands wander until she grows uncomfortable in her sleep-stiff body. Then she shifts each limb, letting her arms stretch out long, hands clenched in open fists, toward the hot, dizzy sun above her. Her legs move side to side, and then she relaxes her whole body again, her head a little way off from the damp spot on her towel where it previously rested.

A few moments in contemplation; then she twists her whole body to the left, confirming a feeling of slight resistance from her right ankle. A little tug on her right ankle when she turns to the left. She shifts her weight again, mostly onto her left elbow, and bends up her right forearm to tug off her tortoise rim sunglasses and lay them beside her, unfolded.

Blinking away the buzzing sunspots, she looks down at her two brown legs, revealed in the sun their constellation of small bruises and bug-bites. A rope is tied around her right ankle – a scrappy rope, bleached and stiff from sun-drying and fraying from overuse. One loop of the rope is tied around her ankle, and the rest of the spool is looped around a pole. The pole is rusty and stunted, and stands stubbornly in the middle of the dock. The rope is looped, sloppy and sad, in messy coils around the short, rusty pole, and a few coils are snaked out around her right ankle. Her ankle is choked up in the stiff white loops of the rope: a wriggling knob of brown flesh against a shock of white matter.

She frowns, her two brows nearly meeting, almost kissing, on the smooth brown plane of her forehead. She stares down at her ankle and tugs it with a jolting bend of her right knee, scraping the white husk of old rope against the gritty dock. She tugs her leg away from the rope and the short, stunted pole; toward her chest and a little to the left – toward the warm green lake water lapping diligently at her side. Her ankle slides free, red and stinging. The rope hisses with friction, and rivulets of sand plume out from between its folds, sprinkling the dock.

Rolling her liberated ankle, she releases her curved back onto the dock again – slowly, fluidly. Her eyes close for a moment, but open again, quickly – barely more than a blink. She breathes in heavily through her nose, and exhales in a little puff, tilting her head to the left, so that her vision lines vertically with the shuffling expanse of green water. The horizontal birch trees, growing from the clay banks at the end of the short beach, stretch out like women’s fingers. A spider does rough magic a little way before her, wobbling on spindly legs up the cliff of water, inching to the shore – the great brown sky.

She moves suddenly, sits up cross-legged, coming out of a heat daze, then folds her knees up close to her chest, with her ankles still crossed. With one hand she reaches for her discarded sunglasses, with the other, she scratches her freckled nose and peels away a piece of sunburned skin. She surveys the lake warily.

The lake is blue the farthest out she can see, darker blue in deeper patches. The water closely surrounding her is shallow and green and lazy, and full of little arrow-head minnows, and the cracking black shell-graves of dock-dwelling mussels. Near the neighboring dock, by the baby trees growing in the flooded sand, yellow pools of pollen grit lap and foam idlily, burping up moldy pinecones and sometimes the bodies of small, dead fish.

She stands up shakily, sunglasses in hand. She reaches her arms up over her head and her left hand grabs her right wrist in a stretch. She bends down to scoop up her faded paisley towel, musty with dampness and gritty with sand particles scratched up from the dock boards. She shuffles on a pair of dirty white flip-flops, and pads down the dock, across the narrow, shifting beach, over the sharp little cliff of sunbaked red clay, and through the large field of tall, stinging grasses toward the bare wooden cabin nestled on its gravel-campground under the canopy of giant, tired pine trees.

•          •          •

On the porch, on the quickly fashioned rope swing – on the thick wood-board seated swing fastened to the sloping porch roof by two thick, white, new and strong ropes – on the wooden porch swing, in the shade of the modest slanting roof of the small, newly-constructed porch: she swings.

As she swings, the wood plank wobbles, the left side jolting forward before the right, and falling back while the right swings forward – boxing. Her brown legs swing freely with the movement of the swing, like two ant’s antennae, hunting for sugar. She swings, sitting right in the center of the plank, in her still-damp red and white polka-dot bikini and her shabby white flip flops, with her black hair hanging down her back in wet knots and dripping little spiral patterns of water on the varnished planks that line the short, screenless porch.

From the wooden swing, through a wide parting in the red pine trees, she sees that the lake forms an asymmetrical “Q”: a sprawling, circular plane of blue-green water, punctured in its center by a small, rocky island and spitting out at its base in a little comma of shallow, silty water; rimmed by alternating patches of red clay and yellow sand. When she squints, the lake water is unblemished, waveless – a fat blue pebble, an immodest reflection of the cloudless blue sky.

She watches the blue lake and the red clay and the yellow sand and the brown bobbing dock, on which she can still make out the wet rectangle print of her towel. The towel print now circumfrated by five young children playing with big foam noodles in the warm green water and in the soft yellow sand. She can hear, faintly, the shrieking of the children: sharp shouts from the boys with their sun bleached hair, and shrill yelps from the tanned little girls, standing with their stomachs bulging from their swimsuits. They are all lashing out with their big foam noodles at an invisible plane of targets above them, the boys slashing hot and fast at the air, the girls, cautious, looking and waiting, then slicing their noodles up in careful, deadly arcs.

She watches the young children, knee deep in the water, their feet rooted in the shallow till of lake sediments and their arms striking out above them like snakes. She watches one of the girls break off from the pack, hustle through the water, shaking like a dog, carving jagged lines of white froth through the green water. The other children pause for a moment, watching the black bathing suit and its skinny appendages clamber across the beach. For a few seconds they watch, their mouths hanging open, their pool noodles limp in their little brown hands, for maybe 20 seconds, before their eyes snap back to their invisible adversary above.

•          •          •

“C’mere Sadie-cat.” She pulls the little girl close, ruffling the violet-black hair that grows in a stiff, short halo around her little sister’s solemn features – like a bird’s. “What happened, baby?”

“I killed it.” The girl stands with her knees almost touching, shivering – still wet. At the tips of the girl’s long black eyelashes are little beads of water, like crystals, that quiver when she blinks.

“What’s it?” She adjusts a bikini strap over her now-stinging, sunburned shoulder and scoots mostly off the bench, so that she is almost kneeling before her baby sister, with the swing lightly hitting her back, right between her shoulder blades. With one hand she rubs her sister’s sunscreen-streaked arm and with the other she finds the big, musty towel, and wraps it around her sister’s back, watches as it falls off one shoulder and hangs awkwardly from the other.

“They’re killing wasps,” The girl’s eyes grow and shrink under their wet lashes, her little lips press together – white. “Down there.” A chubby, unexpectedly pale finger points down to the bobbing dock and the children jumping and splashing and screaming in the pretty green water.  

“With the noodles?” Her sister nods, and she can tell, from the tiny noise, that the girl is grinding her teeth again. She stands and takes her baby sister’s hand, wrinkled from so much soaking, with its fingernails clipped super short and alternately painted red, white, and blue.

“I killed one.” The little girl looks down, at the sand-sprinkled, varnished planks that line the new porch, her back facing the blue-green water and the candle-wax sun, slowly melting into the west. “With a rock.”

“You know wasps kill honey bees.” She holds her baby sister’s almost pale hand. “They track them by smell.” She stands, not facing her sister; facing the lake, the blue lake and the red clay bank and the yellow beach, squinting into the sun. “And when they find honey, they go back and tell all the other wasps.” She wraps one long brown arm around her sister’s little back, knocking the faded paisley towel onto the porch floor in a messy hump. “And then the wasps come and ambush the honey bees.” With one brown arm around her sister’s skinny back, she walks out and a little to the right, to the almost brand-new staircase that leads up from the sticky pine-needle forest floor to the bright floor of the deck patio, to the second step down, about six inches from the floor of the new deck, blanketed with a thin layer of pollen, to stand on the penultimate stair, squinting at the sun, with her little sister. “The wasps tear off the honey bees’ wings, and eat them, and eat their honey.”

She stands, with her little sister, on a film of yellow pollen, on the white boards of the newly-constructed porch, before the big, blue-green lake, under the huge, creaking pines, at her lake house in the country, in the summer, in the slow sticky heat of the mid-summer, in her red and white polka-dot bikini, and stares into the blurry white core of the tired, late afternoon sun, until she starts to see little black spots.