Undertow

A Short Story

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

Your grandfather was born in a Midwest basement prematurely during an early spring tornado in Michigan, and every day after was the same. As luck would have it, he died the day your mother was born.

She grew up good because she didn’t have a dad, but she made the mistake of creating one when she made you. As luck would have it, you didn’t grow up with the same luxury your mother had been afforded and so suffered like an unripe womb in a stone coffin during a storm

Beaten.

Shattered.

Vivid memories of Radio-Flyer-Red, the color, never the wagon. When you see wedding gowns or people tying the knot on TV, you think of a solid band of gold strangling red this searing finger, center-fist, as it gashes open your eyebrow.

This hairy fist, your dad’s collar-popped chest hairs behind it, bashing your brains in. It’s that same ring on his waxy hand clasped over itself on his lap in his casket that sends you spiraling. It’s like you know that ring will never peel the skin on your cheek again, and somehow it’s like a hug you know will be the last one.

You were on the beach, Grand Haven, the same place you almost died the day before—the day your peeled dad peeled one too many tabs watching Friday Night Television and laughed himself into alcoholic asphyxiation. You’re sunburned because your shirt hasn’t touched your skin in days, and you’re drunk because she decided to come.

The lifeguard who screamed at you yesterday after you got lucky and survived the jump off the pier with the no-swimming red flags—after being bashed into the pier wall on crested capped waves, sucked under and out and tornadoed back against the cement until you finally grabbed a ladder—he walks right in front of you, recognizes you and points. You don’t respond because there’s nothing to say, except maybe, “it wasn’t supposed to happen that way.”

It never is.

You’re too skinny to be self-conscious, sitting like that, trying to flatten your stomach even with your knees pulled up to your chest, pulled up with your arms around them, protecting everything you’re keeping tight inside from spilling out all over the sand.

You’re bruised from the riptide, the headache.

Beaten.

The sun pops off the waves as evening approaches, casting a million shimmering flashes over the seagulls and laughter, and you swear you can hear the crash of flash bulbs.

She lay beside you after she got out of the water. Where you sat in the sand, she came and lay flat on her stomach on the big beach blanket to your back, and you tried not to stare. She wore red bottoms, long strings, and a red top. Her skin baking there, red, glistening—you saw the other guys looking too and you wanted to hurt them, remember?

You didn’t look at her the way they looked at her.

It was different. And that’s what you told yourself, especially then. You wanted to leave but you wanted nothing more than to stay. And you didn’t want to leave—you shut your phone off so long before you knew your mother would call about your dad, so long before you threw your t-shirt away and borrowed a new one and washed the shorts you wore the night before in the same freshwater sweat-soaked bath that should have killed you and let your legacy forget.

Ventured out again into the same spit.

Why’d she have to come?

Because the last time you saw her, you saw her skin glow, and in the yellow light cut like a silk ribbon from the crack in the bathroom door, she was golden with black hair and her smile was white, and your heart already broken.

Shattered.

You can still feel how her sweat where she had lain was warm and matched the temperature of your skin until it slowly cooled like morning haze and then it was like sleeping with your window open, and something had gone missing.

Rolling over on a damp towel like now, only there she was again, and when you locked eyes she smiled in a way that made you think it was mournful. Fire bloomed across her pale skin in patterns molded by constellations—this fire-truck red kaleidoscope of repentant disesteem.

You’d cut your heart out before feeling this way. It’s not as though you invited her, but there she is, and everything before is like this pulse that drums up this urge to vomit like someone’s squeezing a bulb to check your guts.

There’s something about the sun when you look away as it hangs in shimmering silence, and part of you wants to cover your ears because of the scope of the thing. If only you couldn’t still feel.

These silent conversations happen in tandem around you, all teeth and wrinkled eyes, and all you hear is ringing and you don’t know if you should be laughing or screaming as you watch. If you could cry still, you would, but it doesn’t seem appropriate so you go in the water, swim under water, swim until it’s almost too cold to bear; where you feel this effervescent tickle lap at your ankles and you remember the clutch of that whip on your soul.

They’re so far away. Far enough away none of them are looking, so you let your toe taste the temperature of the current you can’t outswim. When Tess, the only one who sees your stare and the heat it brings, touches your shoulder, tells you, asks, ‘is it time to go?’ you’re not sure what she means.

She’s your best friend though, and she guides you back to shore.

People you’ve grown with, loved, hated, loved again and never knew chase each other with sand arches raining down like calcic glitter, dusted bone. The last time you all were in the same place, she was there too only things were different because it was before you found strands of her hair threaded into your clothes no matter how many times you washed and pulled.

Had to pick them out all day.

It was that easy for her to never let you forget, so easy, all she had to do was be there. Don’t forget that she didn’t go there with you.

When you grip your toes into the sand her impressions are still there and they’re like quicksand, like if you find them just right they’ll pull you in. They’re still warm, so you pull away.

Twigs in you break away with each shuddered breath, shuttered bristled things that snap and fold with each tumored twist, knocking loose columns of resolve and something you can’t feel anymore.

On the drive home, there’s a shared feeling. You’re burnt and dry and sand shard rakes in the corners of your eyes, but it isn’t that, and it isn’t the smell of the beach and the sand on that day that you’ll always remember and never know.

But it’s powerful, so powerful you can’t ignore it. It buzzes in you and the others have to feel it, but saying something feels like a bubble on the verge of blowing apart.

She walked with you as you all stumbled to the cars, you more than the others, the burn in your throat keeping you clear. She walked with a white towel draped over all of her in red, and when she reached his car, he opened the door and you couldn’t help but watch. Before she sat, her face caught yours and she didn’t smile.

When they drove away, the sun caught her window, and glare like fireworks blinded you, her face, lost behind blooming white fire, where were her eyes?

The words on the radio are saying it, and everyone’s considering it, because Tess, she slowly reaches over and turns the knob, and—

“Far—

—it’s exactly what everyone wants but is too afraid to say.

—I don’t care where just far!”

There’s a tremble in the air—this decision presenting itself, and over it, your pressing responsibilities; the window is cracked and everyone looks out their own—looks at the pinhole lights in the black curtain before you as it lies over this fire of crimson and pink and whirling yellow that shoves you away from the shore.

And on a fucking vein with nothing in front or behind, it dies.

“I don’t care where just far”—you all agreed without saying anything, but you watched your fingers twitch when that exit sign to your childhood approached, and as Tess made up her mind without saying a word, something in all of you died silently on your tongues in disintegrating breaths of wasted hopes.

A hand on the shoulder.

Pushing thoughts outward: “Keep going…”

Black is over where you’ve come from, where you’ve gone, and everything now ahead, because you know that after this, everything is changed forever.

Tess went to school and dropped out and got beaten up by boyfriends a lot before settling. You tell people you wish you’d have known; what you don’t say is you don’t talk anymore because you slept together when you both needed something that couldn’t exist. Jay went to jail where you visited twice, and Meghan, sixteen and still older than her mom had been, went back to school the next day, the clinic the next, and off onto blues the next week until she fell off the face of the map.

Troy painted the ceiling and Katie colored her bathroom with her veins.

When twilight catches the rearview sometimes, it hits you in a way that smells like that night with the open air and the dried skin cloying with spray and heat, and in quiet moments, your eyes wander. There are moments like lineage births in turbulent forms, miracles drowned in vomit, and the hidden ones that are only felt and sometimes forgotten.

Like ripples of bodies diving from a pier over glass lake silence, impacts take their time; like that night when you should have kept going instead of riding out the blood-rush years of thinking you’ll make it—and later when you finally couldn’t, you were told they found Tess your ex best friend in a shit town face down, dead behind a gas station bathroom during a storm.

Beaten and shattered.

Waves crash on a black shore, where footprints wash away.