Floating
Or, Why We Long for the Color Blue
It’s mid-day. The rental is probably due back, but I left my watch ashore so I can’t know for sure. It’s waterproof, but I still worry. Ma took almost everything else of his with her.
The sky is putting on a show for me today. It’s layered green-blue-green-blue like sedimentary rock, and the sun isn’t in one place but stretches all the way across, an extended camera flash holding the ocean in its lens. It prickles my skin where I’m turning pink. Lying on my back, I watch the horizon continue to stitch the sky and sea together. Overhead, silver threads weave themselves into a thick gauze, a belt of clouds the sky hangs from like a curtain. A stripe. Another stripe. Another.
Pa had six. We sewed them on ourselves. Ma measured each strip out by eye and stitched them on by hand. The hour-long task became three days as she made him pose for us before each new stripe, as if how he carried himself would demand a tweak, two degrees and one millimeter this way—or she just couldn’t keep the final product in her head without full context: Pa among his rig, a backlit mast of man the color of raw gold and just as rare. He stood steadier on water. She’d then hand the strip to me who, with the iron, would pin it down and smooth until the edges crisped and corners became sharp. One time and only once, while Ma was out, I tried to place a stripe myself. I stood up on a chair and he came toward me, the weave of his suit so coarse it made me stiff but for my hands, which shook with each warm breath that cascaded down my hair. “You’ll come with me one day.” And then he went back to sea.
The last time he came home, several stitches toward the back had come undone. A fishing hook had caught him. But when Ma looked at the torn thread, the ripped and weathered fibers rising from his shoulder like the hair of a frightened animal, she saw something else. She had me smooth it down but it was warped, a wave caught in the the fabric. The more I tried to smooth it out, the more it unraveled.
A wave comes to help me on my way, spraying briny droplets upward like the sparks of a fire. Looking back at the shore, I see how far I’ve floated, my pile of earthly possessions a pebble among so many boulders.
The horizon is close now. Will it rip open? Will it let me through?