Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

Half ancient fish, half woman with strange, submerged memories. She senses Tex on this river, in the early morning before first light, casting his line out into the waters. She follows some familiar current to where she hears the thin line hum past trailing the little worm, fluke tail squibbling by. It’s an easy thing to take it in, feel the hook set, sit there awhile feeling the determined pull on the line, giving way just enough to keep him from snapping it. Rising beside the little boat and looking wall-eyed into his astonished face, wouldn’t she see him then as she never had?

She remembered Tex fucking her the night she knew Sarah was conceived, their bodies bowed into one another, movements fluid as waves. Watching his face.

Tex saying two weeks after it happened, We could try again, Beth. But it was almost as if he hadn’t meant to say it, as if the words had been spoken into his own brain some other time, recorded, and now tripped accidentally out. He sat on the sofa, long legs crossed, looking very tired, the skin beneath his eyes bruised, though she marveled at how otherwise youthful he was, his thick blond hair and unlined face, a tall and lanky boy with pale blue eyes. Though younger, she was surpassing his age.

“I had this dream,” he said, “the other night.”

In his dream he was talking to one of the doctors, though it wasn’t one of the doctors who’d been there in real life. The doctor said that if they had operated and taken Sarah out carefully, they could have saved her. But she was dead, Tex said in the dream. Well, we have amazing technology these days, the doctor said.

Tex’s long, tapered fingers fluttered against his knee. He blinked, gazing out the living room window at the pecan tree in the backyard.

“I woke up sobbing like a child,” he said. “I was afraid I’d wake you up, but you were as still as a stone.”

“I’m sorry,” Beth said.

Tex shrugged. “It was just a dream.”

In a minute, she said, “I just don’t think I could do it all again.” Her voice quavered and she stopped, frustrated at how hard it was to speak of it at all.

“We’re not too old,” he said. “It’s not too late.”

But she hadn’t said just that.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said.

SHE TURNED HERSELF OVER in the water and came up again into the air, and her knees dragged bottom, and she saw the current had taken her into the shallows along the bank. She floated there and then sat on the muddy bottom, the water lapping the point of her chin. She wished she could push from herself everything that she felt. To be light as a sack of dried sticks floating on the river. She heard the thudding weary footsteps of the others approaching through the clearing at this landing, breath ragged, and they came and stood on the bank near her, hands on knees, heads bent low, dragging in gulps of air. “Oh, fuck, I’m dying,” Julie gasped. “Are you all right?” Beth raised a hand from the water in reply. May fell to her knees and began to throw up, one arm held flat-handed generally toward them. They were quiet except for the sound of May being sick, and when she was finished she rolled over onto her back in the grass and lay there.

Beth and Julie carried May, fortunately tiny, with one of her arms across each of their shoulders, back along the river to the downtown landing and then up the hill to Beth’s car. They left her in the back seat and struggled to walk through the deep pea gravel of the lot into the bar and borrowed some bar towels for Beth and then sat at a table drinking Jameson’s neat and not talking for a while. May dragged herself in and sat with them and the bartender brought her a cup of coffee. She lay her head beside the steaming cup and went to sleep again.

Julie reached out and took Beth’s hand for a second and squeezed it.

Beth squeezed back, then they let go. Julie looked down at the floor and held out one of her feet, clad in a ragged dirty Keds.

“Pretty soon I’ll need a new pair of honky-tonk shoes,” she said sadly.

“I like them,” Beth said. “My mother had a pair just like that. She wore them to work in the yard.”

“I didn’t cut these holes out, baby, I wore em out. I got a big old toe on me”—she slipped her toe through a frayed hole and wiggled it—“like the head of a ball-peen hammer.”

“My God,” Beth said. “Put it up.”

“Billy says I could fuck a woman with that toe.”

“Put it back in the shoe.”

“I’m’on put it up his ass one day,” Julie said.

Somehow they’d become the only patrons left in the place. The bartender leaned on an elbow and watched sports news on a nearly silent TV above the bar. Julie looked at the sleeping May and said to Beth, “Don’t worry about all that, that shit May was saying. She’s just drunk. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

“No,” Beth said. “I know what she’s talking about. She’s right.”

Julie stared at her blankly, then sat up and sighed.

“I can’t even remember what all she was saying. Forget it. You should forget it.”

“I don’t want to forget it,” Beth said, and set her shot glass down on the table harder than she’d meant to. “What do you mean?”

Julie didn’t answer.

“It changes you,” Beth said. “It’s changed me. It’s different,” she said. “It is worse, Julie. It’s not like the other time. It is worse. A real child.”

So then she’d said it. Julie had started to say something, then turned her head away, toward the wall. Neither said any more after that. The bartender roused himself, flicked off the TV, and his heels clicked through the tall-ceilinged old station as he went from table to table, wiping them down.

They drank up, paid, and left, hefting May’s arms again onto their shoulders, and put her into the car. Beth drove them to May’s house, and they helped her to the front door, got her keys from her pocket, and let themselves in. Her husband, Calvin, was at the hunting camp building stands. They took her to the bed and undressed her, tucked her in, put a glass of water beside the bed and a couple of ibuprofen beside it, and drove to Julie’s house. Julie started to get out.

“You okay to drive home?” She sat with one leg out the open door, in the car’s bleak interior light.

“Sure, I’m fine,” Beth said. She caught herself nodding like a trained horse and stopped. Julie looked at her a long moment and then said, “Okay.” Beth watched her till she got inside and waved from the window beside the door. Then she drove home through the streets where wisps of fog rose from cracks in the asphalt as if from rumbling, muffled engines down in the bedrock, leaking steam.

SHE WAS PRONE these days to wake in the middle of the night as if someone had called to her while she’d slept. A kind of fear held her heart with an intimate and gentle suppression, a strange hand inside her chest. She was terrified. Soft and narrow strips of light slipped through the blinds and lay on the floor. Their silence was chilling.

Just after four a.m. she woke and Tex was already gone. He hadn’t moved when she’d come in, his face like a sleeping child’s. She’d lowered her ear to his nostrils, felt his warm breath. He slept with arms crisscrossed on his chest, eyebrows lifted above closed lids, ears attuned to the voices speaking to him in his other world. She hadn’t heard him rise and leave.

The covers on his side were laid back neatly as a folded flag. One crumpled dent marked the center of his pillow. He had risen, she knew, without the aid of an alarm, his internal clock rousing him at three so that he would be out on the lake at four, casting when he couldn’t even see where his bait plooped into the water, playing it all by ear and touch. He knew what was out there in the water. If a voice truly whispered to him as he slept she hoped it spoke of bass alert and silent in their cold, quiet havens, awaiting him. She hoped it was his divining vision, in the way some people envisioned the idea of God.