WATER
Dorothy Parker was born at the Jersey shore, a cosmic joke for such an urban creature.
After that, she liked her scotch neat and her seas troubled.
“This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”
Dying Of Thirst
Word Count 1585
Four gallons of water and packages of beans and tuna weigh down my backpack, and no matter how I adjust them, the straps dig into my shoulders. I dab at the sweat dripping down my temples. My lips hurt. I understand Gatorade now. We come to a cliff and follow a narrow cow path. Because it’s steep, I sit cautiously and scooch down on my butt. Which goes pretty well, until I try to stand back up.
I raise my arms and legs into the air, then thrust them forward in an attempt to use momentum to right myself. I stay glued to the ground, a flailing beetle. Finally, I awkwardly twist and jerk, avoiding cacti and other thorny plants to get onto my hands and knees. Pushing myself up to standing works.
Everything here--a few miles from the Mexico/Arizona border-- can kill you.
The Baptismal Flaunt
Word Count 1367
About a month after my husband shot himself, my mother-in-law came to my house, talking about “the water.” My baby was almost two and hadn’t been baptized. He had to have the water. “He has to be given to God by name,” she said. “That way, if he dies, he’ll be with his father in heaven.”
My baby might die? And he had a name. And didn’t suicides go to hell?I didn’t believe in much, but I believed in hell. With his one shot, my husband had almost taken me and the baby with him. Nothing had a shape anymore. Pieces of our life fell all around us, shards, sticks, bricks, rocks.
Sailing Lessons
Word Count 1733
I should have taken sailing lessons before I had kids. But I came to sailing late when my kids were nearly adults. Even so, the parallels were striking.
Every Wednesday night I rode my bike to one of dilapidated sailing clubs skirting Toronto’s harbour for classes with students the age of my kids. Only one other woman was on the far side of middle age. We learned our lessons well, though, and within a few weeks I could rig a boat, rattle off the points of sail, knew when to tack or gybe. It got so I could tell the speed and direction of wind before class from riding my bike to the club.
The Albacore dinghies were lined up in rows on the pock-marked lawn, the gentle slap-slap of metal halyards against masts a deceptive peace.
Alternating Currents
Word Count 1389
1995:
The day after I broke up with my boyfriend I took our dog for a walk in the garden at the back of our apartment building. As I watched Polo sniff at the ragweed that was contributing to the heavy pollen count already giving me terrible allergies, I leisurely swayed back and forth on a wooden swing envisioning my new future, just a young woman and her dog.
My daydreaming was interrupted by my now ex approaching. He begged me to reconsider. Polo rushed over, all puppy energy wanting to play. But my ex, hell-bent on reconciling, shooed him away. Taking this as permission to roam, our dog headed toward the pond for more explorations. It was a man-made pond, always freshly landscaped with brightly colored flowers. Polo was not the only dog who loved to splash in the water.
House For Sale (Must Act Quickly!)
Word Count 823
Over the past decade, the view from my grandmother’s deck in South Wellfleet has become only more and more awesome, in the true meaning of the word, as storms and erosion have knocked down the two homes in front of it, and the land beneath them, into nothingness.
On the deck, surrounded by the roar of the sea, shifting winds and tweeping birds, one senses that our deck is just going to get more and more beautiful until it is gone. Are we safe and stable for fifteen more summers, fifty more summers, or is this our last? No one knows. Anyone with eyes open to the weirding world would say anything is possible.
You Can’t Bathe. You Can’t Wash
Word Count 815
The entire town of Jackson, Mississippi lacked drinking water for almost a month in the winter of 2021. The poorer —and Blacker—neighborhoods of south Jackson also had little to no water pressure. The city’s two water treatment plants are on the higher-income north side of town, historically white neighborhoods where the pressure usually ekes along minimally even in boil-water times, enough for toilets, baths and laundry, anyway.
I’m an occasional New York Times freelancer in Jackson, covering news like the drinking water outage. For this story, I drove around the south part of town looking for locals who’d stop and talk. I interviewed water case-lugging volunteers and recipients at the New Jerusalem Church’s water distribution site.
Exposed
Word Count 928
The beach towel flapped around my shoulders and my sandals slapped the dirt between the rows of gravestones, some fallen, lying like gray bodies in the young green grass as I took the shortcut to the cemetery on my way to the pool. The sounds of kids screaming and laughing and adults yelling floated through the trees.
I went through the ritual of gaining entrance to the fenced-in pool, showing my pass, turning past the desk to the women's showers, putting my denim cut-offs and t-shirt in my bag on a bench, showering in my bathing suit, the first bikini I ever owned, white with red, green, yellow, and blue stripes, a halter top that tied around my neck and modest bottoms okayed by my mom. Trying not to think of all the ways my body wasn't perfect. Grabbing the towel to wrap around my waist.
Water Under The Bridge
Word Count 627
I was born under a Water sign; I’m a Scorpio. We’re secretive; we’re loyal; we make terrible enemies. Our memories are long and we’re notoriously vindictive. We have a hard time letting go. Scorpios are also known for their hyper sexuality. As wet as we are and dark as the night, there’s no surprises there.
Allow me to tell a little story about a raven haired Ken doll of a boy–“Hot Rod”– and “Cass”, a blonde Barbie doll of a girl.. Cass and I were fourteen. Rod, two years older and in possession of a driver’s license, seemed like an older man. Cass fell for him hard but her parents said she was too young to date. As her best friend, I helped engineer their furtive meetings where she said they soul kissed. He wanted more but she resisted and he threatened to break up with her.
I Kind of Hate the Beach Anyway
Word Count 1325
My eyes are squeezed tight. Bluish-silver sprinkles dance across my internal vision. Will it hurt when I open them?
Everything hurts.
I slip my toes deeper into the sand in front of me. The grainy blanket feels cooler where half my foot now resides and somehow, this soothes me, and so, this feels like a good decision.
I need a pedicure.
I brush my hand across my chest and feel the telltale sting of an ever-blossoming sunburn. I’d need to rejoin the conscious to apply more sunscreen, so I’ll just scorch.
I imagine a melanoma diagnosis and the resulting surgeries and likely disfigurement.
I reluctantly open my eyes a sliver. I’m preparing. I have to prepare. I don’t have any confirmation if he’s still sitting next to me, but I anticipate the worst.
The Body As Liquid
Word Count 450
I don’t know when it started exactly, but I have a clear memory of standing in front of a class, talking about Frankenstein and beginning to sweat. The room was air-conditioned but my body was suffused with heat. Sweat trickled down my spine, tickled along the line of my bra, sluiced in my armpits. Could the students tell what was happening? Was my face flushed? Did they think I was about to keel over? In the academic version of “the show must go on,” I kept talking, even as my body puddled.
This astonishing heat happened a few times before the penny dropped: I was having hot flashes. Me.
Ultra Marine
Word Count 103
Svengali has nothing
on this blue; this is the blue
that will require no action
impose no desire – look into
this water and you can reflect
on nothing.
Her Small Sea
Word Count 1208
We went to the water with my mother. She was a fisherwoman in another life, I think. In this one, she was a loving wife and adoring mother. She learned to fish from her father and was at peace drifting on the waves, looking out at the line of horizon, comforted by its constancy. It did not ask much of her, but to stay afloat and to return.
Mom would drive north, with my little brother, Markie and me, to Milton, Vermont, where, for us, Lake Champlain was just a semi-circle of bay, down the dirt drive, to the small camper my parents owned. There was a tiny world inside and the cobalt blue lake a few feet away. Every year, as we grew out of last year’s sneakers, Mom cut the fabric in the toe ends so we had sandals for the stony beach there. We stored them, with the fishing gear, in an old school locker that fit tightly between two birch trees.
Off the Wall
Word Count 1777
The anticipation is palpable. The school year is over, and I can't wait for the city pool to open, to spread my beach towel in the grassy area beneath the flood wall, grease my body with tanning oil, hang out with friends, and dive into the icy blue waters of the freshly painted pool.
The town has no deadline for opening day. My small town, Pineville, Kentucky, is cradled in the heart of the Appalachian Mountain. The city pool will open when it is ready. I'm walking with my best friend, Ruth Ann, to hang out with other friends, Patty and Stacy Owens, who coincidentally live only three houses from the floodwall on Laurel Street, which runs parallel to the football field. Another friend, Teresa, arrives at the same time. As middle schoolers, we have no cares and nothing to do other than lament and obsess in wonder of when the pool will open. The suspense is killing us. Our summer is on hold. We want the fun to begin—and now.
The Great Flood
Word Count 1038
By the late afternoon, it was still raining. This was no ordinary rain. This was the Indian monsoon in Kolkata, in Ballygunge to be specific, in the south of the city. When I returned after lunch from my teaching job, our street was already up to my knees in water. The taxi driver had refused to leave the main road. By the time I reached the steps to the front door of our downstairs flat, my sari was a soaking wet six yards of cotton, clinging to my ankles. The water had already reached the third step and getting into the house was rather like disembarking from a boat in filthy brown water with all sorts of strange debris floating past.
I flip flopped through the house, my sandals oozing water over the mosaic floor. My two young daughters were playing in the back room watching the water rising in the small yard and identifying the assortment of objects floating past.
If Memory Serves
Word Count 820
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It’s always ourself that we find in the sea.
-E.E. Cummings
I have a memory, a gray, blurry, shadowy movie-memory. It must be wrong — how could it be right? — but it has haunted me for years. I was only six when it happened. Somewhere there is a home movie of the scene — an accidental movie — which I remember watching, taken by my father, but where is it now? Long gone, maybe moldering in a brother’s basement, or evidence deliberately destroyed? Who to ask, though? How? But the home movie is what I remember, even though I was there when it happened.
Swim Like a Butterfly
Word Count 1490
The three-and-a-half-foot deep Family Pool was open that afternoon because the Olympic lap pool had a leak. All the lap swimmers packed up their goggles and their Speedos and went home. The kids who usually crowd the tepid Family Pool with its “Lazy River” and the parts just a half inch deep weren’t out of school or daycare yet. Even the deepest part was too shallow for me to strap on my turquoise Aqua-Jogger and pump back and forth, which is what I do now since I developed the cell clumping mystery disease of Pulmonary Sarcoidosis. Aqua-Jogging, to a serious lap swimmer, is the equivalent of chair yoga, (not that there’s anything wrong with that, goodness knows that seated Kundalini chanting helped bust open some of those clumps and kept me sane.) It’s just that my face, if submerged, suffocates, and my joints are too tight for any downward dogs. So I remain upright in the old person section of the big pool and some days I gaze lustfully at the lap swimmers clocking their miles and I project they are glancing over at me in pity.