water child
Caroline Chou
It is well past midnight when she slips into the water. Smoothly, silently, with the grace of a fish. The moon hangs like a single lightbulb in the navy blueness of the sky, a blueness that flakes away to reveal concrete starlight underneath. The night air swoops through her hair before rushing to join the pelicans roosting in the cliffs.
People are still awake somewhere, the lights of their bars and taverns staining the docks across the bay. But on this jagged stretch of sand, there is only the tide rushing in and out, in and out.
When she dives beneath the waves, the world stands still.
This is what she swims for, what she lives and dreams and breathes for: saltwater coursing through her veins, a familiar coolness pressed flush against her skin, the steady rhythm of her strokes slicing through the waves, in and out, in and out.
In another life, she thinks, perhaps she was a fish. Perhaps that is why the watery darkness all around her feels like home the way the city never was. The current pushes her on, sending her fleeing from the coast. Perhaps that is why she doesn’t mind when the exhaustion sets into her bones and threatens to let her fall to the bottom of the Pacific.
But empty hands pull her back every single time.
When she emerges from the surf, dripping gooseflesh and wrinkled fingers, empty space is there to greet her. Hollow and silent and cold. It beats in time with her heart as orange stains the horizon.
The shadows of another summer stretch long and low beneath the streetlamps. She meets no one as she walks home alone, lightbulbs flickering out behind her.
Caroline is a young writer from Maryland with a love for leitmotifs and magical realism. Her work has been published in Ice Lolly Review and recognized by the Alliance for Young Writers. When she’s not writing, you can find her playing golf, reading, or marveling at the way time passes when she procrastinates. You can contact her on Instagram @clswriting.