This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2020 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Gisela Levy
The whale was oblong and alien, a hulking ridged heap on the shore, and you told me you were going to throw up. Nobody else seemed to have noticed it yet, and it felt perversely important that we were the first people to discover this mistake in the order of nature.
“Maddie, stop,” I said because you had dropped your empty bag of pretzels and were walking towards it then. The whale hadn’t even started smelling or anything yet, and I thought about it drying out in the sand mere hours before we arrived, trapped in its body like a bloated, heavy thing.
It had very human eyes. You walked up to it suddenly, solemn, and put your hand on its flank, a little kid in front of this gray enormousness. Nothing we could ever do would move it. We were so small, and I always remember us small like that, together, shrunk down in the face of the bigness of what we were seeing.
“It’s so beautiful,” you said quietly when we walked away. “I’ve never seen a whale like that up close before.”
Something I never told you then but I’ll tell you now is that you were beautiful too, browning freckles up and down your arms in the middling of the summer, eyelashes long and impossibly dark, the same purple scrunchie as me. We bought them at the drugstore together on the last day of sixth grade.
You did throw up afterwards, in a trash can on the side of the beach. Sticky and too sweet. I threw up with you too, in solidarity. I’m not sure if it was because of the whale, still looming, rotted, in our minds, or the fact that we had licked up all the salt from the bottom of the pretzel bag, hungry with desire to see every granule melt on each other’s tongues.
***
It takes forty minutes by ferry to get from our island to the mainland. I suppose some people must cross every day for work, and we always went once a year for class trips to museums and cultural centers. But other than that, it all feels very far away. It’s easy to tell the difference between us and the ferry people. The ferry people are loud, and excited, and carry large backpacks. They have come to stomp across cerulean shores in their hiking boots, to buy fresh fish from the marketplace. We laugh at their self-assuredness, the paleness of the skin on the undersides of their arms.
I will never become a ferry person, I thought then, and I never have. There is something painfully sad, and real about them. They go back to routines and lives that make sense. When they get off the boat, their feet plant solidly into grounded earth—secure, certain.
Did you think that too, when we made fun of them? I’m not sure. When we colored together on the floor of your bedroom in elementary school, as I drew fish and squids and deep-sea creatures, you drew ferry people, with violent t-shirts and insect-like sunglasses. Your colored pencils traced the contours of their bodies gently, lovingly.
The last time I ever left the island, on a school trip to the aquarium, I started to forget things. I couldn’t remember the color of my house, or which street we turned on to get to school in the morning, or in which tide pool we found crabs glittering like illicit rubies. Like the island is only truly real when you exist on it.
“Maddie!” I called to you panickedly, and we focused hard on the ferry-ride back, watching the silvery tops of trees emerge from the mist. Making sure it was still there.
***
I’m not sure if you remember this, Maddie, or if you’ve been gone too long, but this is why people came to our island: to build fairy houses. There is a festival every summer where lute music plays tinnily from hooked-up speakers, and piles of wishing stones are erected next to the pond, and kids dart around in fluorescent fairy-wings. There is a copse of woods in the center of the island where a sign encourages you to gather moss, and bark, and pebbles, and make little homes against trees. To build miniature tables out of sticks, to whittle a mushroom-cap into the front door.
The ferry people come, in the stark starch of their cotton t-shirts, and they build tiny structures with large fumbling hands. They wait for the fairies to come. They take pictures with their shiny cameras. Eventually, they go home.
“I feel bad for them,” you told me once. “It’s like they trek all the way out here for something that’s just fake and manufactured.”
“I guess,” I said. “But there’s something really good about just building that little house, though, don’t you think? And waiting.”
I’m not sure that you felt the same way about it that I did. Once or twice I saw you sneaking through the woods from the corner of my eye—disturbing the winding pebbled paths of each home just slightly, leaving little half eaten fragments of berry in the vestibules for the ferry people to find them.
***
A dream I’ve had as long as I can remember and keep having still: I am at the helm of aship but it is twisting under me, like dream ships do. I strain at the steering wheel meaninglessly but it spins under my fingertips as if it isn’t steering anything at all. I am somewhere grey and foggy and in-between. It might be the ferry, but I can’t tell what direction we’re heading in. I look around for you wildly, because I know you must be there, you must, I can hear you breathing somewhere off to the side, your fingers cold on my wrist. I think you might be one of the passengers I am ferrying below deck, glowing like little embers in my belly, but there’s a chance you might be the ship. I can feel the exhalation of the ship underneath me, my feet sink into blubbery softness, and something (Spit? Ocean spray?) flicks out of the blowhole.
The prow cuts through the ocean, and water flares along the sides like wings.
***
We had all said that we would get out eventually, the way people always say these things, that it was only a matter of time. The island had a constraining haze of unreality about it, a place where tourists go, a haven for curiosity shops and kitschy museums and things washed-up to shore.
“I want to live in a real city, Kristen,” you told me once when we were sitting in your kitchen, “With art and culture and like, millions of people existing together all at once.” I shivered at the thought of so many people, the weight of them crushing me, but I smiled at you. “I can see it,” I said. “I can see you on the fifteenth floor of some deliciously glamorous apartment building—”
“I wonder how it feels to spit from that high up,” you said, “it’s probably so satisfying,” and I laughed and shoved you gently in your rib cage because you were stupid and because I was sure, even then, that you’d escape.
“And you,” you said, “you will be, like, this sexy female pirate roaming the seas and taming these sea monsters and I will visit you every weekend in your adventurous boat-house.”
I smiled, because I wanted to be that for you, but it made me sad to think about how far apart we were in your imagination of our future selves. It struck me, suddenly, that I was your shadow, caught in the window, creased in the drawer. I needed to slather you in soap, sticky and lathered up, to attach myself back on.
It turns out it didn’t matter anyway. It was around that time that I started getting scared of the water. It was only little things at first. The froth of the sea lapping at my feet felt threatening when we walked along the shore. I steered clear of swimming pools. Crossing over the water, anywhere, became out of the question. (Now, thirty years later, I don’t even wash my hands. I keep three bottles of hand sanitizer in my purse. Weekly I rub it all over my body, and strip layers off, stinging like a plucked chicken).
***
If you know how to look and what to look for, the beach is littered with many things of value. Shells, of course, some filled with the ocean (and some filled with other things.) Bottle caps. I found a small silvery fish, once, wriggling in the wet light. When it opened its mouth, I was scared it would start to talk to me. I threw it back in, solid and cold momentarily in my hand, and then in an arc towards the briny deep. I know how these things go, and I’m not looking for any granted wishes.
We used to comb the beach together. One time, you found a half-eaten banana. I waited for you to throw it out, but instead, you pulled out a spool of thread and started stitching up the exoskeleton, neat and almost surgical.
***
I kissed you the first time we were ever drunk, at Nat’s party during a summer I no longer remember. It was suffocating and crowded and impossible to hear anything. We were older then. We had outgrown our summer bodies.
I followed you to the row of alcohol that sat on a ledge of the basement we were in and you mixed two different dark liquids in my cup. I laughed. A girl we kind of knew was getting more to drink too.
“Hey,” she said, her grin flickering, flashing at us.
“Hey,” you and I said at the same time, or one beat apart, flickering too. (An outsider’s perspective: Hey, said Maddie, and Maddie’s ghost.)
“I like your shirt so much,” she said shyly. You were wearing something pink with ruffles on the shoulders that glistered newly and tightly.
“Thanks,” you said, and grinned widely, and touched my forearm, and we turned away, our cups sloshing.
I stopped suddenly, in the middle of the mass of people, flushed, aware of something creeping up on me. “Shit,” I said. “Shit.” Pulling one of your puffy sleeves. My pants were tearing along the side seam where my calf strained against them, inching all the way up as I tightened my thigh, frayed threads devouring me.
“It’s okay,” you said, and took my hand, and we weaved through the people. You pulled me inside a coat closet in the hallway and tugged your sewing kit out of your purse. You licked the thread and pulled it through the eye. (It was a secret then still, but you had told me you wanted to be a designer.) When you are finished, my pant leg is tighter than before, contained.
When the night got hazier and everyone else left to be outside or whatever, we were still sprawled in the closet. I wondered what the other girl was doing out there. I remembered the whale, summers and summers ago. I thought of something I had learned since then, that whales beach themselves because they are hurt, or chasing smaller, nimbler creatures, or because the noise of ships and machinery drowns out their echolocation abilities. Your fingers traced inscrutable designs on my wrist, gently moving up my arm.
I turned, because I felt the night has reached this timbre, this quivering sheen, and I leaned over to you half-buried under coats, and kissed you softly on the lips. A pause. I can’t tell if you are surprised. (Your shadow has peeled up from the ground. She is wearing the same scrunchie as you. Her shadow-tongue has slipped inside your mouth, like she is begging you to sew it down there, where it belongs.)
You laughed in my ear, low and mean. “Be careful Kristen,” you said. “You know this is not what we are.”
No, that’s not what we were. The announcement of your marriage in the newspaper floated to shore a few years ago, just like everything eventually floats over (or at least things that have gone lost or missing, the husks of things with their insides used up.) You looked older, in the waterlogged photograph, happier even.
***
Do you still remember, Maddie, when you opened up your acceptance letter in a chemistry lab during the last year of high school? I was sitting next to you. We were lab partners.
The mixture we were supposed to be making frothed with none of the right things inside it. You smiled at me, giddy with the certainty of it.
I pushed the beaker of water we needed across the counter towards you slowly, and then checked and re-checked the rubbery gloves for holes and possible cross-contamination.
“Can you add this in?” I asked you softly.
You nodded. The boat inhaled raucously underneath us.
“Kristen.” You said, and touched my rubbery hand briefly with yours so I looked up.
Your eyes were glowing with something, the possibility of foggy futures stretching out infinitely in front of you.
I am making my own mixture, secretly, inside my head. Seaweed, coins from the wishing pool, and the quiet thing that has grown between us like a small, dead animal, furry and with a warm weight to it. All things I am too scared to obtain. I can feel it nestled against my chest, burrowing in, as I look at you.
***
Someone needs to stay behind and keep the ferry running. You all can cross over, live fabulous adventures in far-off lands, drink swirled cappuccinos in bustling cities, see the works of the masters, deserts and snowfall and cherry blossoms. I will wait here, for you all to slink back eventually when we are old and tired. You will want to see your parents, the mossy woods where you fucked for the first time, bleached rib cages half-buried in the sand.
I refuse to set foot on the ship, but stay on shore and man the ticket booth. I collect tickets from people who have purchased their spot. I watch the ferry people come in, and I see them go out again, like the tide.
***
Years later, when I start thinking that I see you flickering in the corner of my eye like an imaginary thing, I know. I take off work and I sit on the beach for three days, toes curled in the sand, careful not to touch the wetness. The funeral announcement washes up, ensnared in pieces of coral and the tangle of a shipwrecked pocket watch. You are an artist, and a fashion designer. You have children.
The next morning, I buy a ticket from myself. The water roils, tumultuously and terrifyingly, below the dock on which I stand. I think there might be something glimmering underneath, but I am too frightened of the salty swirls to look more closely. My stomach is sour and curdling when I step on the ferry itself and it starts moving. To avoid looking at the water, I look into my lap, and then at the ferry person sitting next to me. She is examining the coins in her purse, slowly, methodically. The small, coppery ones clinking against other small, coppery ones, different parcels in the wallet, counting out exactness. When I get to shore, I have to take another bus to the right city. It turns out there are many more cities than I ever thought.
I’m not sure what I expected to see when I walked into the church. Maybe a casket, completely empty save for half-eaten berries and pretzel salt. Instead you are there, very real, and wearing real person clothes. They are one of your designs, I can tell. You have distilled the translucence of tulle wings, of being buried under dozens of coats, of fish scales. The little leaflet that they are handing out talks about your wife, and your dogs, and your freshly-born baby. I see it winking at me across the aisles like a little raisin.
After the ceremony, I walk up to your wife. I can tell which one she is because her hands look solid enough to build things.
“Did you know Maddie?” She asks me, kindly. I have stood there for a beat too long.
“Only kind of,” I tell her truthfully. “We were friends a long time ago.” If I were a real female pirate I could have found you sooner. Followed maps, gnashed my teeth at enemy ships.
Someone gives her the baby and it smiles at me. I must smell like hand sanitizer and the sea, and I’m definitely not wearing the right clothes.
“Hi,” I say to it. I think that I can see Maddie’s nose in the outline of its pudgy face, or maybe there is something similar about the eyes.
***
I think it is very likely that you have sewn yourself up in a whale skin that you have found, young and long and ripe like the inside of a banana thread-stitched softly around the edges. I imagine you ensconced in the big looseness of this skin far out in the deepness where I will never find you. I can’t reach you but when you wash to shore I will plunge my hand into your whale intestines and pull you out, fresh and mine again.
Maddie, Maddie, let me know when you cross over back to me. I am sitting at the tollbooth, I am Charon and you are my girl with the golden coin in her mouth. We will shrink down as small as ants and go into the woods together. I have a little house for us all picked out.