Michael Seidlinger: The Fun We've Had

“She was just a simple, jaded girl.”

Just cause for tired eyelids.

Eyes closed.

If she had a heartbeat, if she needed to inhale, this would have been where she sighed, matched by the skipping of her heart. Enough of a skip and a sigh to be something of a reminder that the decision could be as simple as the flick of a light switch.

But to make this all possible, she needed to remain where she was, not tampering with a single thing.

That was his role.

She would sit until sitting no longer matched the momentum of the sea. The current had its way, each wave pushing and pulling, would-be directionless when it was clearly wind-swept intent. The tether was not yet severed between where they had been and where they would soon go.

She could feel sleep getting closer, the kind of sleep only the dead could experience.

Rowing without oar, his arms were too frail and yet, because the sun, once again, met him in the middle, rays shone from directly above him, heating his skin, causing the little borrowed body to sweat and ache. He forced the most from each lean, felt arm dislodging from its socket.

He wasn’t just rowing for himself. He rowed for two.

He rowed for the relationship he would sooner cease to be than to lose. There’s some truth to that statement. The growing rumor was that it wasn’t so much a one-sided effort. More like it seems right to believe that it was mutual.

Believe what you want to believe. It was a mutual effort in the appeal of never losing interest.

In his mind there was only her.

In hers, he liked to think he sat among her favorites. If confidence rang high, he’d go so far as to say he was her reason to live. He was her reason to wake up in the morning.

In the very least, it was true for him, clear of the sort of affection he had always felt for her.

Waking up was so much easier if he knew she’d be there, the first thing he’d see.

And though he couldn’t be sure of where they were, or how they’d get out of this, he would at least make sure she was safe.

If this body were a body in the physical sense, it would have broken into pieces during the hundredth attempt to fight the current. However calm it now was, the sun proved to be far worse than any rain.

When he couldn’t seem to picture anything — nothing to see behind the sun’s glare, nothing to see on all sides of the horizon — he made up for in voice. Odd how the words arrived only when he had no other choice, when he had no clear place for them.

“Hey now.”

He paddled with the left arm.

That might be pain shooting up his spine, maybe.

“What I was going to say was…”

And he held onto those words, barely able to wrap his thin fingers around more than two at a time, and drowned them in the water, the water so warm.

Still the waves, the silent sea.

For the first but definitely not the last time, he looked, and really looked, at the body that he hadn’t realized he borrowed.

“Yes” followed by “No” followed by another “Yes.”

Pink shirt on grey pants.

What the hell.

And…

“That might not work for the best.”

Sweat dripped down his brow. Smell the sweat, the stench in no way the way his body should smell.

These eyes, these lips, this tongue couldn’t be his.

How could it only begin to register now?

And still, for this to work, he couldn’t see himself in the water, even when he freely chose to look into the water, hoping to see a reflection. He couldn’t kiss her because she wasn’t the same either. He couldn’t taste the sweat on his forearm without thinking that he had abandoned who he was for the role of an imposter, a role he hadn’t desired. Not even once.

That sort of bubbling confusion could only be fought by physical exertion. Default to the imperative, the lone need.

Because he couldn’t figure out where they were, it had to be dangerous waters. He half-expected to see enemy ships, sharks circling their little bit of help, this… coffin?

“This,” what he chose not to believe was a coffin.

Words rushed him now.

“The park is still open.”

Drowned the sentence with his frantic paddling, the skin on his arms wrinkling from saltwater.

“The squirrel we like needs to be fed.”

Whose words were these? He looked over his shoulder just in time to see her neck snap to one side.

If she wasn’t well, how could he be any better?

Because her neck snapped in such a way that couldn’t be anything but the final snap, the eyelids remained shut even as she tried to look, tried to give him her best sort of encouraging look.

Senses haven’t completely failed:

She could still hear him and everything he said. How couldn’t she hear that voice so loud, shrill, and terrified?

As her neck snapped, she gave in.

She gave up what she had fought without reason to keep. She no longer fought the basics. She no longer had reason to feel so numb and ineffectual.

It all had to do with denial. It had everything to do with what she felt was her fault.

The disease grabbed her as she reached in to take risk on full-throttle. Senselessly the source of their demise wouldn’t return to her. Everything before seeing her hand reach into a dark expanse of undefined space, she had nothing but him to fill the blankness that now blotted out her memories.

A new worry boiled in that potbelly of hers.

She couldn’t move.

Her neck had snapped. Could she remember?

She couldn’t move because she knew what this meant.

She wanted, at this very moment, even if it was in that gruff male voice, to tell him what she had told him more than anything else. She wanted to say, “I love you.”

Maybe it would sound wrong. Maybe it would fall flat upon her telling him, but then she would lean in, turning to the next sense, the sense of touch, and she would touch lips.

Her chapped, almost bleeding lips, touched his young red lips. Just imagine:

That body, the body that he borrowed. The body of someone she can almost remember, much like the body she borrowed seemed so familiar. But not yet.

For her to believe that her neck was really cracked and broken, none of this needed to work.

No lips touching.

No “I love you” declared.

For it to work, she needed to float in the only sort of sleep those floating toward demise could experience. It was the sort of sleep deemed half coma and half defeat.

It was a brand of sleep that wafted with no breeze, weighed down in the mild pain of dark, sunburned skin.

It was the sort of sleep that only she would experience.

She slept for the full-effect, until senses rose sharply up her spine and it was clear that dead bodies feed on dead thoughts; any pain or pleasure could only be drawn from the filed away mindset called the “past.”

Anything to be said or spoken had already been said.

By the look of the borrowed body, she was a middle-aged man, career-doomed and desperate for legacy.

Those young impressionable eyes were incapable of holding back what he saw: Vacant seas, hidden depths, and the reflection cast on the calm waters, the one that eluded him strictly because he had wanted it to remain elusive. Blue eyes that saw for a dozen years, little more than that, could not blot out what he now knew, what he distantly held as true.

Look and, indeed, he looked.

Really looked, and what he gave was similar to what she gave. It would be right to say that he gave it all but nothing about what happens between these book covers is even remotely close to “right.” Him and her, a man that in his giving up, at least as much as is needed to admit that his body isn’t his, his body borrowed much like his breath ceases to exist, his name registered both here on the page and in his memory at the same time.