Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #6

darting back and forth between them and the beach. All around her, little heads and snorkels popped up out of the water. She felt like she was looking at the scene on a movie screen, felt like she wasn’t quite alive in this hot skin in cold water. She closed her eyes briefly. The image burned into the back of her eyelids. The cold medication was wearing off now, but her brain was still in a fog.

Gracelessly, she bumbled into the deeper water, remembering the instructions of the man on the boat. Light kicks. If you get water in the snorkel, one good blow will usually get it out. When she was deep enough, Karen dipped to her knees and then onto her stomach, her face plunging into the water, jaw tightening around the malleable plastic snorkel that tasted of chemicals.

There was more white sand below her. She floated above a school of translucent fish. For a moment, it was just her labored breath and the coolness of her body. She kicked with her feet―toes tight against the hard plastic, her clumsy body easing through the water―and soon she was looking down not on plain sand, but on another world, her aches and fever nearly forgotten.

Breathe in. Yellows and blues and browns popped against the white sand.

Breathe out. Fish the size of lake trout and the giant clams with their crimped lips.

Breathe in. Corals that looked like a pile of old sticks. Corals that looked like waving grass on a prairie in the Midwest. Corals that looked like puffballs, threatening to release a spray of spores if stepped on. Corals that looked like the towels that were creased on the tub of the hotel they’d stayed at on their honeymoon. Corals that looked like brains.

Breathe out. “All Cnidarians have stinger cells triggered by touch. They’re used to catch prey or in defense. Class, tell me again what a Cnidarian is.”

Breathe in. The monotonous breathing made Karen feel hollow. Ahead of her, someone trampled on the reefs close to the surface.

Breathe out. “He didn’t suffer,” the doctor told her in the stark white hospital waiting room. A brain aneurysm. “He never felt a thing.”

Karen’s foot began to cramp. He breathing became strained. She wanted her feet planted on the ground again. Her side ached. Her heart ached.