Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

“They're going to wrestle,” Birdflower said. He pointed to the threesome lining up by the pit. She watched the women do muscle poses. The referee touched the mud and winked at the men in the front. Emily stared at the small sequined suits. “They look my age,” she said. “You can tell by that crepe paper skin on their upper arms.”

A whistle blew and the jukebox slackened mid-song. Birdflower looked embarrassed. He was opening and closing his own little umbrella. The two women stepped into the mud, arms out like sumo wrestlers. There were tentative ringside shouts of encouragement.

Birdflower pulled her wrist forward so their heads met in the middle of the table. “We can leave.” Emily shook her head. Men around her were lifting off their chairs. Smoke from their cigarettes was backlit by the red net candles on every table. More men lined up against the walls, long-neck beers held with a finger in their belt loop.

“I want to see this,” Emily said. She had said that same thing years ago about a porno flick her husband had rented for a bachelor party. He had reluctantly set the projector on a chest of drawers in their bedroom. Lights off. A little square over the bed no bigger than a TV screen. And many men around one woman, at all angles, moving in a variety of directions like some out-of-whack machine. At the end Emily left the room. She made no comment, but it stayed with her. Later that night as she moved her husband onto her, she closed her eyes and somehow felt what she'd seen all over her body and then imagined more than one man with her and for an instant it was simple; she was a functional organ. Like a heart pumping.

Emily sunk lower. She watched the women down in the mud roll onto each other. The mud oozed through their toes, under their arms, and gathered in their hair. One was down and there was a two-beat chant from the back tables and then a roar as both women twisted like water moccasins. Emily braced her hands on the table; she felt as if she were being sucked into the mud. She saw herself in the pit: brown mud hiding the everyday her, letting her become someone only her body knew. With their strong arms the women pulled at her waist, kneeled over her, and pinned her arms. When she tired and looked into the face above, she found that it was her own muddied features. She jerked. The woman pressed up to her lips and kissed her. The room was only dim red light as her other self disappeared into the mud.

The crowd cheered. Emily watched the girls in the ring claw and kick. The dark-haired one straddled the other. Emily felt the mud squish between her stomach and another's. Both arched up into familiar pinup poses. The referee circled like a dazed bear.

Birdflower grabbed her hand as people all around started to stand. He shouted, “Baby, let's go somewhere civilized.” Emily heard this, but just smiled and ran a finger down the curve of her cleavage. She was already wriggling in the mud. There were other shapes approaching her, moving on her. Emily watched the women push each other's face into the mud. One wrestled the other's top off. Emily fingered the nipple of her breast. The muddy top was held up like a caught fish. The chanting was louder and Birdflower's hand tightened on hers. He used his head to signal toward the door. The cheering voices were like an ocean. You can't tell them apart, she was thinking. They could be anyone. She could see only through a mass of men's legs and around their hips, a jungle of body parts. Slithering like some new animal, she found her way, feeling the mud on her neck and between her legs. She'd slip off her dress and roll till, if she lay still, no one could find her. Only her light eyelashes would rise out of the mud like seedlings. She was very close. Only a few men to pass. She went slowly, squirming all her parts forward.

A hand tightened on her arm. “Where the hell do you think you're going?”

She knew him and watched him carefully through slit eyes as he pulled her through the crowd toward the exit sign.

Emily did a dead man's float in the motel pool. The moon was like an earring she once lost. Inside, Birdflower was lulled in sleep by the air conditioner's steady breath. She'd come out to stand on the diving board and do an easy striptease, T-shirt then panties floating near her like huge petals. Lazily she lifted her head for air and saw herself in an aquarium, a fish floating sideways, cloudy-eyed on top.

There were plate-sized lights underwater. A NO DIVING AFTER MIDNIGHT sign, scattered lawn chairs, and a vista of two long double-decker rows of motel rooms, clipped shrubs, and the late night stars above. Emily preferred the ocean — she backstroked from blue ceramic side to side — but this was nice, clean water on her skin; her body a showpiece, a trained porpoise doing laps. She floated, toes arched skyward, and sank into an underwater somersault. Because her mouth was dry, she sidestroked to the spigot under the diving board. There was one childhood moment she always remembered. She'd walked to the rabbit cage the neighbors had in their backyard. Inside the mother rabbit had been slouched over, showing her nipples, a baby rabbit attached to each one. Off to the side, there had been a dead one covered with a dozen flies. One of that rabbit's eyes gazed loosely into the straw. And she'd stood there at six or seven, her hands climbing into her shirt for her own nipples. This is me, she thought and turned her head up to the sky.

Emily left the spigot and dived underwater. Swimming along the bottom, her belly grazed the pool floor like a blue-gray shark.

She floated on her back: body down five inches, head a mask above water. She had seen Eddie walking barefoot along the main road with Lila. He'd dropped her hand when he saw Emily's car. She spread her arms and legs out wide like angels in snow. Maybe now he was on the beach with her, their hair blown back from their faces, Eddie's head flipping from the moon to the girl's blouse whipped tight around her. She had to be careful what she said to Eddie about girls, because her feelings were irrational; she felt jealous and oddly suspicious of the intentions of a local girl like Lila.

Emily rolled over and over like a kid circling down a hill. John Berry might be on the ferry tomorrow. His face was unclear. She remembered now just a vague beefiness around his upper thighs and the coarse quality of his hair.

Emily held to the side and kicked small tight scissor cuts. As though it was boiling, the water bubbled around her. Birdflower opened the door of the room and stood by the small outside light in his underwear, his long braid over one shoulder like a girl's. He climbed down the stairs, cleared the metal fence, and squatted by the pool's edge. She saw his body pinprickle as he lowered himself in and with one hand loosened the band of his braid.

“Let's not go back,” he said.

Emily laughed and splashed water at him. She swam to the darkest edge of the pool.

In a quick head-thrown-freestyle he trailed her, cornering her, and pressed his body against hers. Emily's back rubbed tiles.

“No way,” she said.

“Come on,” he said.

“Everybody lives on an island.” Their wet heads bobbed above water. Emily said, “Some just aren't out in the ocean.”

“You're so profound,” Birdflower said, his hands resting on each side of her rear.

Open-mouthed and falling, Emily kissed him. She saw at eye's edge a light flicker on in the first-floor row of rooms and a man at the window, looking up to the unanimous night sky and then holding a drink high as if in a toast to her.

W ind moved the small Cape Hatteras office. John Berry flipped photos like cards into the circle of light in the middle of the room. He shuffled to one of himself and Emily on the beach, beers in hand and a bonfire in the background. Her face was flushed and her hair fell into a center part and blew slightly forward. That night, everyone had been so drunk around the fire, singing songs and one guy telling about times he went out on a late-night shrimper with his father, and how the trollers would gather around the boat with the best storyteller, and how that man's voice would whisper into the scene of lantern lights nodding from boat to boat. Near sunrise, John Berry had awoken with Emily's full weight on top of him and he'd carried her to the truck as the sun inched up. He folded the photograph. The next was of him and his father, both in Bermuda shorts, standing in Wanchese Harbor. That was the last time his father had been off the island before he died. For a minute John Berry looked into the tiny eyes of his dad and was oddly lonely for him. But his father had not minded dying. Earlier in his life he'd said right out that he'd seen more change on the island, and in the world, than his father had and probably more than John Berry ever would. At the graveyard, on a bright June morning, one which seemed to take away all the gloomy corners and uncertainties of death, John Berry had stood near his father's grave, and as the first shovel of dirt was pitched down, he threw in a handful of white sand. It sprayed up like the points of a wave, dazzled, then landed — pelting the coffin hundreds of times.