Tara Ison - Rockaway

But he doesn’t want that, she feels him pull away from her mouth. Her throat closes up without him there, and she wants to cry. He moves her gently onto her back; she just misses getting a clutch of his shirt as he sits up, rises from the bed.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “I gotta get something.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, no, it’s really okay,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. Just come back.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

She can’t possibly explain to him why it doesn’t matter. She shakes her head.

“Just hold on,” he says, walking to the bathroom.

“Fine, okay. Whatever.”

He comes back, rolling on a condom. He climbs on top of her, prodding her legs open with his knees. She knows she’s still dry, that his entering her will hurt, draw blood, but she wants that, suddenly, wants to feel pierced, opened up, made raw. She winces at the first drive of his hips, at the rasp, and reaches down to touch the thin rubber lip of the condom as it sinks flush against her. She holds him there a moment, inside, but he draws back a sudden, abrading inch or two. It feels he’s taking her skin with him. He pushes in again, and it eases. He pushes in, and the piercing goes sweet. He kisses her, and she sees them creeping forward together in the dark and he is holding a white candle out before them to shed light. Each thrust, each step, casts the light deeper into the darkness, illuminating it, brings the light deeper inside of her, and she wants it deeper inside of her, she wraps her legs around him to help, get it deeper, the light thrust fully inside. She moves her hips harder, wanting that burst between them, and feels a slip, something loosen. She tightens herself around him, squeezing.

“Hold on a minute,” he says. He closes his face up tight, turns away from her.

“What?”

“Just. . wait,” he says. His breathing comes hard, then slows. The loosening expands, and her insides sag as she feels him slip out of her. “Man,” he says.

“What happened?” she asks. “What did I do?”

“I don’t know.” He raises himself on an elbow, gropes between them a moment. “Lemme get this thing off.” She hears the snap of rubber, and he flings the condom off the side of the bed. “I don’t know,” he repeats. He drops down on top of her again, his face still turned away.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She reaches for him. “Maybe—”

“No, don’t do that,” he says, pushing her hand away.

She feels found out. She feels like treyf, like unholy meat. Like a leprous soul. No, she realizes. She doesn’t have a soul. Because if she did have a soul, she would be precious to him. She would be a blessing, a thing to treasure and keep safe forever. He would open to her and shower her with light. But he’s looked into her, and seen nothing, and now he knows and now she knows, understands at last. She’s just been a body. A shell on the beach, a pile of compost. An illusion of depth. A plastic mermaid, left hanging on the rim of a dirty glass. No, falling, falling to the floor. No wonder she can’t hold on to anything, her plastic arms have been snapped off and she is a cheap fake thing, emptied out and wholly without grace.

She waits until she hears him breathe in sleep, then gets up, gets dressed, and leaves.

THERE’S A MOON. There’s a jumble of footprints. There are Drumstick and Baby Ruth wrappers, abandoned Fudgsicle sticks, a squeezed-out tube of Bain de Soleil. Crushed paper cups, their seams stained dark. Cigarette butts, sunflower seed shells, a broken plastic shovel, a tight ball of aluminum foil, a gnawed apple core. A pair of sunglasses missing one lens, an RC cola can, bent at the waist. Everything achromatic, a range of grays. The beach was so clean when she first arrived. She remembers her ritual of walking here, the breadth of warm, slipping sand, the tougher strip stiff with drying seawater, the wettest sand licked over and over by waves. Only seaweed and driftwood and feathers and shells when she arrived, and the endless hopeful sand. Now there’s the messy trash of it, and the dead strewn jellyfish, and there’s her. She remembers thinking the ocean looked different here, richer. Promising. She remembers wondering if women’s cut-up bodies ever washed ashore here, how you know when that begins.

She hasn’t been out here at night before. She’s seen it behind glass, framed from her bedroom, the glints of wrinkling dark water, a ship’s lights through fog. But she’s in it, now, part of its depthless, toneless scheme. There’s the flat white moon and the flat blacks of crumpled trash and the flat gray canvas of sand freckled with broken shells. She sweeps her hand through the dry sand, tries to draw a clean line, but the sand falls in upon itself, obscures her finger-traces among the labyrinth of foot tracks to multiple nowheres. There’s a house alight with music and God to her left, and a house filled with photos of laughing, blood-linked people to her right, a house bursting with greens behind her in Connecticut, and far away west there’s a house full of what’s left of her own blood, facing another ocean, waiting for her. She tries to imagine another place, someplace left for her to go, but all she can picture is a 8’ by 7’ by 5’ vault, a storage space she owns, temporarily, and only saw once, with wood-slatted sides and concrete floor, where everything left that belongs to her is boxed and blanketed away.

She looks across the moon-bright, swaying strip of wavecrash. She picks out of the mazed sand the singular footprint trail that leads to the sea. She gets to her feet and walks, and the prints fit her step by step, fit each step’s heavy leaden weight until water touches her skin and the prints swirl away and she stops.

She pictures plunging in to the wet acid cold. She pictures the water sweeping her out, the firm sand dropping away beneath her. She feels herself letting go, how she might float off and disappear. The stinging jellyfish will burn her to ash, the sharks will shred her flesh, the tides will pull her close, drag her off in their angry embrace and she will let the deep water chill take her, choke off above her the last of air and color and light there is, that she’ll ever have to see.

She takes another few steps and the black water teases, brushes against her ankles, her knees, and dances out again. She hesitates. She closes her eyes, smells sun-baked sand and towels, sweet fruit. She used to be able to do this, didn’t she? Dive right in, blithe and carefree. The water is warmer now, and she leans, touches its softness, remembers frolic and splashing through waves. All by herself. Then a stumble, a crash, crashing and dizzy and getting back to her feet, looking toward land for assurance and applause and steadying foothold care to make sure everything was okay. To make sure she was safe in the world.

She turns, looks back toward shore. This time: no one, nothing is there.

She steps forward, deeper, the water rising to her thighs, her waist. A wave-ripple nudges her, lifting her up with gentle tease and catching her breath in her throat, then her feet touch sand again. But the water is insistent, pushing her about and off-balance. She turns her back to the next wave, digs her toes desperately for balance. She scans the deserted beach, the black blind shines of beach house windows, the vacant lifeguard chair. All of it, taunting her, daring her.

She hears a deepening hum, the sound of rising churn, feels the water abruptly pulling away from her, luring and stumbling her, and she turns, too late, to see a moon-glinting dark rise of water surging at and above her and too late to swim away or escape, and she is finally knocked fully off her feet by the crash, flipped and sucked under into the gritty salt cold.