Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

“Do you like having a kid and all that?” Lila said.

“Sometimes it's good,” Emily said. She reached down and poked at shells. “What do you think?”

Lila said, “I wouldn't want to be like my mom or do the things some ladies do.”

Emily tied a calico scallop shell to the strings of her bikini. “You don't have such clear ideas of what you like and don't after a while.”

“I hope I always will.”

“I hope you do,” said Emily. Birds pattered in front of them, always flying up a few feet before they passed.

From the corners of her eyes, Lila watched the little tummy that seemed to rest on the elastic of Emily's bathing suit bottoms.

“I think I see a beached fish up there,” Emily said. “It looks like a shark.”

“I see it,” Lila said. She wasn't nervous about being with Eddie's mother now, just a little strained.

They both jogged toward where it lay skewed on the sand.

Lila thought of a time she'd walked with her parents on the beach. It was one of those memories before her fourth birthday when everything came to her as sensation: the wind trying to push her to the wet sand, the waves chasing her, the shells she wanted but was too slow to get before the white water took them back into the sea.

The shark was four feet long and solid like a huge piece of rubber. Its mouth had little sand bugs running in and out, and one eye gazed to the sky.

“Let's roll it over,” Emily said, using a piece of driftwood to poke its belly.

“Why?” Lila said. “It's dead.”

“Help me.” Emily put down the Coke can and pushed against the fish. Lila snuggled her can in the sand and helped Emily heave.

“Eddie used to want to take these beached fish home,” Emily said as the fish flopped over, showing a white stomach and pale blue sex parts.

“Think it died of old age?” Lila said.

“I guess so,” Emily said. “Do you love my son?”

Lila didn't speak for a few seconds and then said, “I think so.” She kicked the shark softly, little taps with the smooth pad of her sale. “What kills me is that life slips off them.”

“Yeah,” Emily said, kicking the shark hard with her toes. Lila raised a foot, stood on the carcass, and offered a hand to Emily. They balanced together on top of the shark. Lila saw that its right eye was filled with sand. She put her toe near it, and a few grains brushed and drizzled from the bottom lip of the eye over the gray-blue skin.

E mily cut the peaches she had soaked in warm water. The skins pulled off easily as a wet bathing suit and she sliced them paper-thin. Holding one in front of the kitchen window, she saw pale orange veins, then laid it over the others which over-lapped slightly like fallen dominoes. Each time she touched it, the angel food cake gave off tiny confectionery sugar puffs. The sound track from Camelot was on the record player.

She ate another fig from the white bowl. Above all other fruit, Emily loved the ass-shaped fig. The flushed purple-green skin and the inside tentacles, sea-like and sweet. And there was that grainy way it made your tongue feel if you ate too many. She picked them carefully from the tree in the backyard near the fence. Squeezing them just enough to know exactly how ripe they would be.

She hummed the songs with the record and thought of Lancelot and the thin, girlish way she'd always envisioned him. She had a theory that all men were either like the beautiful boyish Lancelot or like Arthur, burly and earthy. The crab bisque steamed dreamily on the stove and the cobia, surrounded by green pepper and mushrooms, was baking slowly in the oven.

Birdflower was coming over and Eddie had invited Lila to dinner. A family occasion, she thought, turning the cake slowly around and admiring it as if she were in front of a mirror in a new skirt. After dinner she had promised to pierce Eddie's ear.

It was August. Soon the cold would be in the late night air and then begin inching its way hourly into the day. Eddie would leave in a week and she would settle back into herself, go into the hibernation that happened to all the island people after the tourist season. It was a gradual seclusion, much like the way the sea edges back to itself at low tide.

Again it would be phone calls, crackling and tentative, Emily telling him island gossip and relaying seasonal scenery details: the snow on the beach, the first spring rustle of young sea oats, the joebells budding near the cottage.

“In Camelot,” Emily sang in a high, tinkling voice. “Do, do, do, do,” she hummed into the bisque, then wiped her hands, leaving a mark like angel wings on her dark shorts.

At the table, she imagined each person in the place set for them. Birdflower, his clean hair held back by a piece of leather, on her right. Eddie on her left in his jeans and black T-shirt. Lila near him, her fingers woven through his under the table. Emily's eyes clicked to the next spot. She had set one too many places and leaned over the table to sweep up the silverware. John Berry tipped her chin. “What about me?” he said and held his plate up for more.

The needle was hiccuping against the end groove. She removed the record, walked to the bathroom, and pulled off her shirt. Adjusting the nozzle, she tugged her shorts off. Tan lines made her body into a geometrical sculpture. Emily poured shampoo into her hand to suds her scalp. She put her face under and felt the bubbles run out of her hair like a long veil down her back.

There was a hand moving past the shower curtain through the falling water, resting on her hip, then sloping slowly up the curve of her breast. Emily leaned into the hand that went to her collarbone, her neck. The curtain split and Birdflower pulled her head out of the water. His lips tasted of warm sun and tobacco.

She rinsed carefully, sticking her rear into the stream, arching her back, moving so every part got water.

“Get us a drink,” Emily yelled. Water beat on the small of her back. She heard the clink of ice, the gulp-gulp of pouring gin, and a knife on the wood block slicing a lime. She turned off the water and pulled a towel into the steamy stall. He handed her a drink and sat on the toilet cover.

“Have you thought about it anymore?” Birdflower asked, mixing his drink with a finger.

Emily let the ice rest against her teeth and took a long drink. She set the glass on the soap dish and swung her hair down in front of her. “Not really,” she said, moving the towel over her hair.

“Goddamnit,” Birdflower said, standing up, filling the small space of the bathroom. “You go on and on never promising, never setting anything straight.”

Emily swung her hair back over her head and reached for her glass. From the kitchen the fish smell moved in and around the bathroom.

He paced in half steps in front of the sink.

“I don't owe you anything,” she said.

Birdflower rested his hand awkwardly on a wicker shelf which held powder and perfumes.

“Sit down.” With her fingers she worked the leather knot out of his hair.

He held his hands to her hips and pulled her closer, ran his tongue lightly in tiny circles around the fine hairs of her lower stomach. He kissed the curly hair between her legs, each time pulling her closer, moving his tongue back into the soft folds. Emily reached a hand out to steady herself. The room felt as if it were filling with water. She knew only the swirling steam and that one wet place. There was a sudden click in the kitchen as the timer rang out.

Emily sleepily opened her eyes. Birdflower stood. She saw a vine moving in his irises, circling to a wreath around his dark pupils, growing even as they stood, straight profiles in the medicine cabinet mirror, shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath, in the tiny bathroom.