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The Rapture of the Deep
Samantha Crozier
Cover Illustration by Derek Xiao
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
-T.S. Eliot
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Table of Contents
A Day in the Sun ------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 In Memoriam----------------------------------------------------------------------- 15 Chess -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 24 The Rapture of the Deep-------------------------------------------------------- 34
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A Day in the Sun
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Far past the place where the black road turns into a red dust path, and
through the forest of old pines that stand green and silent in the still summer
air, there is a wide river that wanders along the trees. In the summer, the river
transforms from a place of gray snow and still water into a sparkling, summer
haven for the people from the nearby town. Men with brown, sun-stained skin
and children who talk of summer breaks spent helping their fathers chop wood
or working at the family store retreat to the river when they have a spare hour,
letting the sun tan their skin and the cool water rush over them. The people
from the town seem as if they are all crafted from the wet clay of the earth’s
crust; each one of them is warm and earthy and smells of grass and juniper
leaves.
The young man with the glass-green eyes who sits on the riverbank is no
exception. He is at the river because today is one of the rare days when he has
nothing else to do. Usually he will sit with his father in an old green truck with
peeling paint and a trunkful of lumber as they drive off to another town to
complete a job, but not today. Today is the hottest July day that the town has
ever known, so everyone has flocked to pools and lakes and rivers, desperately
seeking out cool bodies of water.
The river is crowded, but no one stops to speak to the boy with the
green eyes. The people who know him only nod or offer him a quick smile. On
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the surface, his is the same as all the other boys from his town—he is hard-
working and unpretentious and lives with his family in a small house
surrounded by pines, but there is something about him that separates him from
the rest of the townspeople. At the age where he is too young to be called a
man and almost too old to be called a boy, he is shy and restless in equal
measure—two qualities that the people of his town find hard to understand.
Sometimes, in the mist of the sounds of saws and the smell of wood, he will
catch himself thinking about places far away—places of gleaming silver
buildings and rolling green hills where there is not a tree in sight.
But today, it is easy to push those dreams to the back of his mind. As he
lies on the grass of the riverbank, enjoying the sounds of laughter and water, he
finds that he is almost happy. The white light slants through the trees, pouring
warmth onto the cool grass and shining on the pages of the old, water-stained
book he holds up to his face. After a while, he falls asleep with the old book
next to him, lulled into unconsciousness by the relaxing delirium of warm
summer light and the music of the flowing river.
Awaking from sleep a short while later, he opens his eyes to the hot rays
of the noontime sun. The brightness blinds him, even when he looks quickly
away from the striking whiteness of the daylight to the opposite bank of the
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river. As he blinks away the molten sunlight that spills from his eyelids, he sees
her.
Across the river, a girl has appeared. Standing alone on the bank of the
river, her damp hair hangs to her shoulders and her wide eyes scan the
riverbank, as if she were looking for something. As he watches, she lifts her
arms towards the blue of the sky and seems to pull in the rays of sunshine on a
sparkling golden rope, wrapping them around herself and turning the air to
gold. The drops of water in her thin, yellow hair catch the sun and crown her in
daylight; for a split second, she is not a girl, but a queen—dripping in topaz and
shimmering with pearls. As her crown of liquid diamonds dissolves and falls to
the sharp grass, she shines even more brightly. Suddenly, there is a ringing in
the air, a tornado of light and colors and sounds, all singing with life and
tumbling against each other, with a single girl in pale yellow at the eye of the
storm.
The boy across the river who has just awoken from a sunlit slumber is
entranced by this girl who he has never seen before. She is something new and
golden and bright—and he finds that his eyes follow her as she does a graceful
ballet towards the edge of the riverbank and sits down to test the cool water
with her feet. As he watches her, he notices that she is not at the river alone,
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but with two other friends. Her friends swim in the river, their hair damp and
tangled, and they beckon her to join them in the water.
A high, clear voice sings a word that sounds like music: “Isabelle!” the
voice calls, and the queen with no crown responds to her name, turning to look
at a girl with dark hair who urges her to come in the water. The girl in yellow
hesitates before she submerges herself in the cool river so that she can remove
four rings from her delicate fingers. She places them in the grass and then
splashes out to join her friends. For a second, she dives under the water,
dimming the light of the sun as she disappears from view. But then, when she
emerges from the flowing river, her blonde hair tosses drops of water in an arc
that seems to endlessly curve towards the blue of the sky, painting the air with a
rainbow prism of light.
Despite the number of people at the river, no one gives the girl with
yellow hair a second thought—no one but the boy across the river with the
water-stained book sees the gold that shines from her very being. As he
watches her dive under the water and laugh with her friends he feels like he is
on the other side of time, of space—in a world of colors and whiteness, falling
and floating, burning light and flickering darkness.
The boy with green eyes watches her and grins hesitantly. In that instant,
when his smile blooms across his face, she catches his eye. Slowly, reluctantly
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she smiles too. It is a shy smile—full of self-consciousness and weary caution,
but she smiles nonetheless. It is this smile that gives him the absurd desire to
go to her—to swim with her and laugh with her and be near her as she
transforms the air into sunlight.
But he doesn’t go to her. He is not a boy who speaks loudly or dresses
himself up in shades of red. Instead, he makes his home in the spaces between
people—dwelling in the formless place that is reluctantly cleared to make room
for the ones who do not have shape that fits into the puzzle of a crowd.
Something old and sad lives in the chambers of his olive eyes—a dull hurt that
disappears when he allows himself to hope.
This hope glows like a star in his chest, growing brighter and brighter as
he imagines himself speaking to the gold girl. He thinks of her smile—how it
was shy and quiet and how wonderful it was that her smile was directed at him.
In a brilliant burst of euphoric courage—the likes of which he had never
experienced before—he makes the decision to go to her.
Driven forward by a compulsion that is both infinitely foreign and as
common as breathing, he stands up and takes the first step towards the girl in
yellow. There is a smile on his face and it is all that he can do to keep himself
from leaping absurdly across to the river to reach her. He knows that when he
goes to her, when he stands in her light, all will be right. When he comes to the
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edge of the river, he sees that the current seems stronger today than it has
before, but this does not deter him. He uses a path made of smooth gray rocks
as stepping stones and makes it to the grassy riverbank, his heart beating wildly.
When he sees her, the boy with wanderlust has the sudden feeling that
he would never want to be anywhere else in the world but here—at this river in
this moment, completely at home in this great empty space with these crowded
rays of sunshine. As he walks closer and closer to the girl who is called Isabelle,
he stops just before he reaches her.
He sees her place four rings on her gentle fingers and he breathes a little
faster as she holds them up to the sunlight. They sparkle in the sun, with their
wrought silver bands and deep blue jewels. The rings glitter with silver and
shine with blue turquoise. Each one is shaped differently, catching the light in
different ways.
Suddenly, the glass hope that he holds within his chest shatters as the
realization about who she is dawns upon him. He had not seen her before
because she is not from his town or any town like it. She is from a world of
slinking evening gowns, liquid pearls dangling from earlobes and the soft,
whisper-sweet music of pianos played live in elegant restaurants—a world
where people wear silver rings with precious jewels when they swim in the
river.
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Now the sun seems too hot and the air too thick; the light no longer falls
in brilliant, ordered rays, but in smoldering, chaotic beams of unwelcome heat.
He retreats into the shadows with the painful realization that she would never
view him as anything other than a boy with pitiful hope. When he hears her
laugh at something her friend said, he feels like she’s laughing at him and it only
makes him want to get away faster.
So he draws himself away from the girl with gold light, vowing never to
be drawn to glitter again.
***
Though he never goes back to the spot where he saw her, he stays at the
river until evening, watching the water from a small crag. He waits until the air
is still and then casts his eyes upon the river at night. Sunset stains the horizon
and the bright noontime sunlight that had been stolen from the sky now seems
to run in waves just below the surface of the water. It is a haunting beauty, not
the bright, sparkling glamour of the river during the day, but the river at night
gives the lovely, melancholy feeling of being truly alone in a place of rushing
stillness. The evening sky deepens and glows a dark violet color and the faintest
dusting of stars are strewn a million miles above the highest treetop. The night
breathes colors into the air and the water and transfigures the river into a place
of glittering blue moonlight and hot summer stars.
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But the river at night holds no beauty for the boy who fell in love with
sunlight.
He never got close enough to see the blue of the gold girl’s eyes and the
softness of her white skin. He never heard her voice or listened to the rise and
fall of her words—words that spoke of her desire to travel the world, to read
books that leave her breathless, to meet the boy with the sad smile who she saw
once at a river on a warm summer day. The day in the sun will be pushed
further and further from their minds; they will never get the chance to tell each
other their stories and watch as two stories become one.
He is not a hero and she is not a heroine and they have no love story.
The girl whose world is black and white will never know the boy who once saw
colors that hummed in the very air around her. They will live their lives
separate and content. She will never whisper to him about her dreams and he
will never tell her, with sunset words and a voice like dew that, on one July day
when the air was alive with silver and gold, he wanted to lie beneath the sun
with her and watch as the brown of the trees bled into the blue of the sky and
the world deepened.
As the night wraps itself closer to the earth and the air grows heavy with
starlight, the river runs on. It pushes itself through the weighted darkness in
currents of rippling silver, carrying with it the music of living water and the dull
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ghosts of old light. When it reaches the place where the black water transforms
into white foam, each drop does its fatal dance over the edge of a cliff,
cascading down into a dark pool.
Under a dim moon that only half-dreams its light into existence, the
river tumbles on until it runs into the ocean—that great, scary place where
there are no smooth currents and the sun unfailingly surrenders itself to the
night.
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In Memoriam
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When they first bought the house nearly fifty-years ago, Alice immediately
decided to transform what used to be the sitting room into a place for her
piano. She still had the same black Steinway, and though the notes sounded
weak and the keys had been sullied by years of well-meaning abuse from sticky-
fingered children, she still loved it just as much as the day her husband had
presented it to her as a gift. When she first saw it sitting there, its black lacquer
body shining and a white card resting on the keys that simply said “Love, Will”
in his careful, practiced hand, she drove an hour to his office to make sure that
the company had not made a mistake and delivered the instrument to the
wrong house. The young Will, with his unclouded green eyes and tanned skin,
laughed at her disbelief and insisted that he loved her more than she gave him
credit for. Alice, who had been taught that it was poor form to say that
something was too expensive, simply smiled and whispered her thanks, though
she cringed at the thought of what he had given up to buy her such a grand
gift.
Now, just as the instrument has slowly become less than it was, so has
Alice. Her hands, wrinkled and shaky, struggle across the keys. Some days, she
cannot bear to play because she’s afraid of what she will hear—afraid of the
power that the notes hold over her. Now, as she runs her fingers over the row
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of perfectly spaced white and black, she is overcome by a melancholy that
weighs her down. There is a tune in her mind—something slow and slinking
that she used to know by heart. But she can’t remember the sounds of the
notes of the look of the music; it’s trapped in some faraway corner of her mind,
in an old practice room with boarded up windows and dusty floors. Alice rests
her elbows on the instrument in resignation and a discordant E-flat rings out—
echoing in the ghostly room.
At the very moment of her desperation, she sees a man’s shadow stretch
itself across the wooden floors. Will stands in the doorway—not the strong,
lovely Will of the past, but a man with light milky eyes and papery skin. When
he walks towards her, he limps slightly, as if a weight has been tied around his
right foot. “Alice,” he says, his voice rough from demanding orders to his
subordinates—first only a few and then many as he rose higher and higher in
his company. Before she knew it the bosses at the construction company were
handing him their keys on frayed corporation key chains and using words like
“ruthless” and “entrepreneurial“ to describe him while they toasted his
ambition with glasses of red wine. “I have something to tell you. Will you quit
playing that for a minute?”
Something cold rises up in her and she does not speak or look at him as
he moves closer to her. She does not look at him because she does not want to
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see his eyes—cannot bear to see the pity that lives there or hear the apology
that will quiver on his lips as he breaks the news to her. For weeks she has been
avoiding him—escaping to the strip of sand and water that lines their backyard
or making excuses to go into town on the pretense that she needed more yarn
or sheet music. But now, as he stands in front of her, prepared to accost her
with the news that she already knows, she cannot meet his eyes.
A month ago, she had found the letter in the mail. When she saw that
gold manila envelope on the kitchen counter with a stamped address in the
corner, indicating that the sender was a man named Alan Tesserman from
Seaside Realty, her hands started shaking. She opened the little metal clasp and
saw that the envelope contained a contract with a pink post-it note stuck to the
document that said “Just sign and the deal is done. Congratulations!” Since
then, she has scarcely been able to look at her husband.
“I sold the house” he says, imbuing enough sympathy into his words to
make them sound kind—like a parent breaking grim but necessary news to a
child. “It’s too big for us—you know that. I can’t go outside anymore because
the weeds have grown too high and you can barely make it up the stairs.”
“Call James, tell him to help you clean the yard” she says, her voice
shaking.
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He knows her too well to think that arguing will do him any good. “I
will,” he says, “he’ll be here tomorrow to help us get it ready for the new
owners. It’s done, Alice.”
Still staring down, she feels tears wet her eyelashes. Drop by drop, they
chase each other down her cheeks and gather on her lips. A few land on the
piano keys and linger there, slipping and quivering on the white surface—like
limpid drops of mercury.
She finally lifts her head and looks at him. He sees the redness on her
cheeks and the roads that lead away from her eyes—dewy trails that have cut
through the dryness of her papery skin. Though there is a part of him that
wants to comfort her, he feels a rise of annoyance swelling in him. She is overly
sentimental, he reasons—why should he have to listen to her make excuses for
her fear of change?
It wasn’t always like this. Before they had gotten married, they would stay
up together every night in the living room of their old apartment. She would
play for him until her fingers got tired, and then, just as the last note stretched
into silence, she would ask “Where do we go from here?” And every night he
would come up with a different scenario. Once, he said that, once they moved
out of their tiny studio by the ocean, he would buy her a house somewhere in
New England—where they could see the mountains all around them, but the
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ocean would be nowhere in sight. He made up a story about the children they
would have (all girls, each with a different pair of colored snow boots that they
would wear throughout the entire winter) and the jobs that they would hold
(she would be a pianist and he would be an architect) and the exciting lives that
they would lead. She always laughed at his stories, but a part of him knew that
she wanted them to be true.
So when he saw that house, with its great, arching windows and cavernous
rooms he knew that she would love it. Something about it looked magical and
Alice believed firmly in magic. Sometimes, he would catch her staring out the
window and moving her lips as if in prayer. When he asked her what she was
doing, she would always say “Wishing on a star, of course!”
The first few years they lived in the house were some of the happiest of
their lives. Together, they emptied their few boxes of possessions into closets
and cabinets and spent night after night painting and stringing up curtains and
repairing anything that was broken. She had gotten a job writing for a
newspaper and she would come home each night with the tips of her fingers
covered in black ink. Soon, there were black fingerprints on the corners of
walls, on the white curtains, at the edges of the sink basin, and all over her
dresses. Try as hard as she might, the ink never came off with water and it
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became a joke between the two of them that she had quite literally given the
house her own personal touch.
` On weekends they would go to the beach, first only the two of them and
then, once their children were born, it became a family tradition. Alice would
wear the same, flowing white dress that billowed around her knees and slipped
off her shoulders even while she was pregnant and in the picnic basket, Alice
never packed anything but pancakes. She insisted that nothing tasted better
after coming out of the salty water than sweet maple syrup and so, after a day
in the sun, she would drizzle syrup on the pancakes that had gone limp in the
salty air and swear that it was the best meal of her life. Eventually, Will and
their children accepted Alice’s odd culinary tastes and even started enjoying her
strange tradition of pancakes on the beach.
But underneath all their happiness about their new life, there were
moments when it all fell away. The night when Will’s mother called to say that
his sister had been hurt, that she was in a car accident and bleeding internally at
a hospital outside the city. He was shaking so hard that Alice had to drive,
though she didn’t have a license, for three hours across town. He sat in the
passenger’s seat with an expression as hard as stone and she drove with only
one hand so that she could grasp his as they sped down those empty, liquid
black roads.
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But even then, it was always the two of them. Even when they fought—
even when Alice was in tears and Will sat stoically, pretending that he could not
hear her—they found a way to reconcile. On the walls of the great house, the
same house in which Will once saw a kind of magic, they etched out the story
of their lives.
Over time, though, they stopped going to the beach on weekends. Will
started having friends over from work on Saturday nights; together, they would
sit in the dining room, laughing more loudly as the hands of the clock drew
closer to midnight. When she joined them one day, Alice swore she did not
mind that Will had spilled red wine on her white sundress; but the next day,
that dress—still warm with the sun from a hundred weekends at the ocean—
was tossed into a bin filled with old milk containers and browning orange peels.
Once, when Alice was playing the piano, Will insisted that he would buy her a
new one—the sound was deteriorating and the piano itself was a rickety old
instrument, he said. Will even suggested that he would have someone pick up
the piano and take it away, so that they could go into the city and find one that
played right. He didn’t understand when Alice stormily refused his offer before
falling into a hurt silence. He also didn’t understand why she still sat in front of
the window every night, looking up at an empty sky; the new city that was
being built a few miles away from their house (with buildings that Will’s
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company constructed) lit up the night sky with neon—winning the battle with
starlight. And Alice—ever-hopeful, ever-hurt—wondered when it was that Will
had stopped believing in beautiful stories.
Now, as they stand in front of each other, Alice sees an ending in Will’s
eyes. Though she wants to protest, to tell him that it doesn’t have to end
now—that they can hang on a bit longer, live in this house for a bit longer, her
words falter and die on her lips.
A gust of wind blows through the room and carries with it a piece of
sheet music that had been sitting on the piano. The paper loops through the
air, flapping and lurching with the breeze—like a hand waving goodbye.
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Chess
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In our house at the end of the road, the wooden chess pieces that sat an old
checkerboard were continually being arranged and rearranged.
As I fingered a piece that looked like a horse, I noticed how rough it felt
between my fingers. I didn’t know exactly how old the set was, but the little
identical pieces that made up the front row on each side had all been worn
down so much that their paint was matted and chipping away in some places.
The only pieces that still had bits of varnish on them were the two kings. My
father, who sat across from me, carefully explained that the little, worn pieces
were called pawns. “There are more pawns than any other piece,” he said.
“Every other chess piece has a twin, except for the king and the queen.”
He then proceeded to explain the rules, one after another. As he spoke,
his voice never rose above a steady, speaking tone—even as he raised his pitch
ever-so-slightly in frustration when he tried to direct my attention back to the
board. I had seen him play the game before—brows furrowed, two elbows
planted firmly at the edges of the board before him, fingers knotted in front of
his face to cover his clenched jaw, never lessening his focus even when he was
just playing against my older brother. So when he decided that I, having just
played my last round of elementary school hop-scotch, should be introduced to
the game that consumed all his time, I had no choice but to sit inside with the
single, colorful promise that a round well-played meant that I would get to go
to the summer carnival being held on the pier.
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I didn’t quite understand what he saw in those little pieces that skipped
across a splintering board with flaking black paint—but I listened to his
instructions and asked questions to demonstrate my interest when the silences
between his explanations seemed to grow too long. The only thing that really
captivated me was the names of the pieces. A knight conjured up brilliant
scenes of young men clad in polished metal armor, bearing swords that made
the sound of silver as they were drawn from their sheaths; a bishop brought to
mind the scent of burning candles and dizzyingly potent images of stained-glass
windows that sent light dancing through the halls of a haunted sanctuary; and
the king and queen, of course, were the crown jewels—the lovely pair that was
shielded, for they carried the weight of a country on their shoulders.
My father, who had finished explaining the rules of the game, turned the
board around so that the dull, black pieces were in front of me. “Black moves
first,” he said, “make your move.”
I complied and moved a pawn straight forward two spaces (just like he
said that I could on the first move). He, too, moved a pawn and after he went,
I tried to mirror his moves the best that I could. After he had moved another
pawn, and then a knight, and then a bishop, and then countless other pieces, I
reached out in the hopes of moving my bishop.
“Lucy,” he said disapprovingly,“You don’t want to do that.” And then he
proceeded to explain that he was in a perfect spot to take my king (which I had
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stupidly let get blocked in) and that the only spot that I could move it would
still be directly in his bishop’s line of attack.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Well, you have to put a lesser piece in the way, so that I can’t take your
king,”he said. “You should sacrifice a pawn.”
My eyes briefly scanned the assortment of black pawns that were scattered
on the board. I counted them: five pawns still left. Three sat helplessly off the
board next to a bishop, rooke, and two knights—my father’s spoils. As much
as I wanted to win the game, or at least prove to my father that I could play a
decent first round, I couldn’t fathom deliberately letting him take a piece of
mine.
“Can I do anything else?”
“No. You have to put your pawn in the way, or I’ll take your king, which
would mean that I would win.”
Cringing, I reluctantly pushed a wooden pawn with a star-shaped space
where the paint had chipped off to the next spot on the board. My father, as I
knew he would, promptly added the small, black piece to his ever-growing
collection. I knew that he was deliberately going easy on me—and that my
small pile of white pieces were concessions that he made to make me feel
better—but that still didn’t stop him from making sure that he was challenging
me. Fewer than a dozen moves later, my father uttered the words that assured
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the end of the game: “Check-mate,” he said softly, offering a smile as a means
of apology.
And, indeed, the game was over. My king was trapped—and I was free.
“You can walk to the pier now,” my dad said, “I’m sure your brother will
be at the carnival, you can ask him to bring you home.”
“Thanks!” I said, getting up from my seat at the small table where we kept
the chess board.
I dashed to the mudroom and pulled on my old sneakers with fraying
laces. Quickly slinging my backpack on my shoulders and slipping an extra key
into the front pocket, I turned the knob on the front door and was about to
step outside when I had a wild thought.
Not knowing exactly what I was doing, I slowly walked back into the
room with the chess set. My father had left the same time that I did—probably
to go to his study—and the set sat exactly as we had left it. I looked at the pile
of black pieces that he had taken from me. There, I saw the pawn that I had
willingly given up—the one with the star-shaped space. Without really knowing
why, I slipped the piece into the pocket of my jeans and walked out the front
door.
***
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The carnival was situated so close to the ocean that the salt air was
beginning to rust the metal of the tent poles. Great, mountainous tents were
clustered together and colorful rides that boasted names like “The Fire-Starter”
and “The Wrath of the Waves” lined the edges of what used to be an empty
field and stretched onto the pier. I had gone to the summer fair before, and I
knew that its opening day—which was today—was always the best. The other
girls from my school were somewhere in the endless mass of people who
flooded to the normally sleepy oceanfront town for the carnival—but I didn’t
want to spend my time with them. There was something brilliantly, heart-
racingly exciting about being alone at a place like this. Today, I wanted to be
alone so that I could see the throng of people who I had never seen before. I
wanted to take notice of the roller coaster attendant’s curling beard, I wanted to
read the words “Williamstown Baseball” on the shirt of the teenaged boy who
carried blue cotton candy, I wanted to sit in the food tent with a sugary drink
and an impossible-to-eat caramel apple and watch the fair. It felt grown up,
somehow—watching. And I was proud of myself for wanting to be alone, so
that I could have the luxury of observing.
I was doing exactly what I said I would—that is, sitting in a tent and
eating sticky carnival food. Well, it wasn’t a tent precisely—more like a large,
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tearing red tarp help up by four metal poles and situated near the food booths.
I inhaled the smell of hot dogs mingled with the subtle scent of oil seeping
from the mechanical rides and thought idly that all carnivals must have the
same smell, except this carnival in particular also had the impenetrable smell of
sea-air hanging over everything. From where I sat I could see the Ferris wheel
looping endlessly around a lighted axis and hear the bass from the music
coming from the games tent that made the wooden planks of the pier quiver. I
wondered idly if, from the top of the Ferris wheel, you could make out the
faces of the people below you—or if everyone on the ground seemed as tiny
and faceless as chess pieces.
Just as I was wondering this, I noticed that large groups of people were
migrating to the far side of the fair. On a whim, I quickly finished the last bits
of my caramel apple and followed the colorful mass of fair-goers. Their
destination, it seemed, was a large, purple and yellow striped marquee tent. On
the side of the tent, there was a fading white sign that read “Step inside to see
the Castlebury Circus Company! Over a dozen acts to amaze and astound you!”
Intrigued, I stood in line to gain entrance. When I got to the door, a man
with a straight black beard so long that is was tied with a red ribbon held a
metal bucket out to me. “Five dollars” he said. I slung my backpack over my
shoulder so that I could open the pockets to take out my wallet. I kept my
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money in a duct tape wallet decorated with magic markers that I had made in
class. I felt his impatient eyes on me as he watched me fumble for the money.
Slightly embarrassed of my childish accessory, I quickly handed him a five
dollar bill and entered the tent with my head down.
Once inside, I was immediately struck by size of the tent. Everything on
the inside was purple and yellow, colored by the light of the sun shining
through the tent’s stripes. At the tent’s center, there was a round stage
decorated with a painted-on five-pointed star. The seats set up around the stage
were quickly filling up with wise-eyes circus goers clutching towering cones of
cotton-candy and oversized stuffed animals. I quickly found a seat near the
entrance and sat down.
The show began with wild, instrumental music that provided the
soundtrack for two performers on unicycles. The performers, one man and one
woman, were dressed in identical rainbow-colored body suits. They came out
holding hands and performed a graceful, fluid dance on their one-wheeled
machines. They looped around each other, tying and untying knots that they
had created with their bodies. Finally, they joined their hands together and
lifted them in unison above their heads to create a makeshift archway. Through
the archway, a man in a glittering purple tailcoat and black top hat stepped into
the spotlight.
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“Welcome!” he said, his voice vibrating in the speakers that were placed
all around the tent. “Tonight, you will see things you have never seen before.
Tonight, you will watch, amazed and unbelieving, as the brilliant men and
women of the Castlebury Circus Company dazzle you with the acts that we
have prepared. However, I discourage this dubious attitude. In order to enjoy
our show you must believe, because every single moment of our show is real.
There are no illusions—everything, including the danger—is the truth.” At his
words, the audience erupted into cheers. The ringleader flashed a pointed-tooth
smile at the people gathered and then stepped into the shadows as a young,
wild-haired man led a lion out on a leash. The act with the lion was quickly
followed by an act that involved two men and two women.
The men stepped out first, balancing opposite ends of a long, thin metal
pole that stretched the diameter of the circular stage on their shoulders. They
stopped so that the pole passed directly through the center of the stage, facing
each other and acting as human supports for the beam between them. Quickly,
the two women danced out to join them and the men hoisted the female
acrobats onto the now flimsy-looking pole. The women cartwheeled and
flipped, doing a careful, practiced dance from their perch in the air. But then,
one acrobat—a woman with thin blonde hair and a crooked nose—fell from
the air and onto the ground.
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As she hit the ground, her leg bent under itself, like the broken wing of a
fallen sparrow.
Though she hadn’t fallen far, I could see the sheen of sweat on her
forehead, the growing whiteness of her bottom lip as her teeth cut into it. Her
partner did not cease her routine for a moment, but the audience seemed far
more interested in the woman on the floor than the other acrobat, who, free to
use the whole beam, was leaping high into the air and contorting herself to
capture the attention of the distracted faces. The announcer in the purple
tailcoat was no where to be seen, but, from his place in the shadows, his voice
boomed out: “See, folks. I wasn’t lying. The danger is real.”
I didn’t know what else to do, so I just sat there—in that bright, colorful
tent—waiting for the act to end, the weight of the pawn heavy in my back
pocket.
34
The Rapture of The Deep
35
In those days, I thought I had the whole world ahead of me. I imagined
the rest of my life unfolding before me—becoming more brilliant, more
beautiful with every year. And in some ways it did. When we drove to Searidge
at the beginning of the summer, with two moving trucks tailing our little silver
car, I couldn’t have been happier. I still remember riding in the car with my
father as he listened intently to the GPS. Every time the low, robotic voice
would list a direction he would repeat it to himself. “Turn left in two point five
miles” it would drone and he would whisper “Left. Okay. Left in two point five
miles. Two point five.” Our radio was broken, so I entertained myself by
opening the window and letting the wind blow through my hair.
On the floor of my father’s car, I noticed a damp, browning maple leaf
from our old house. Wet with rainwater from this morning when we departed,
the leaf went limp in my hand when I unbuckled my seatbelt and picked it up
off the car mat. It looked just like the hundred other leaves that blew into the
dining room when I opened the front door, or got stuck to the bottom of the
black heels that my mother bought me for my first school dance, or lined the
floor of Henry’s tree house. I swear, when I found it there—that perfect,
simple symbol, the last years of my life summed up in one frail object—I was
convinced that it was some kind of sign. So I ceremoniously ripped it into four
little pieces (one for each member of my family) and held the torn remnants of
36
my old house and my old life out the window for the wind to carry away. It was
time for something new, I reasoned, something wonderful.
As we drew nearer to the ocean, I watched that great expanse rise up to
greet us. The air smelled like summer—that salty, grassy scent that made me
want to take deep breaths. If I squinted my eyes into the evening light, I could
almost see the place where the black road melted into the horizon. And, at
exactly the place where the road ended, I saw the lighthouse. With each day
that I lived there, in that summer and the years to follow, I began to identify
more and more with that lighthouse, even if the redone lighthouse-keepers
home that we moved into never really felt like mine. Sometime decades ago,
the light went out and never shone again, but no one had ever bothered to fix
it. In those odd moments when I felt nostalgic for a past that didn’t belong to
me, I would sit there in that vast, glass-windowed room at the very top and
imagine that the dust motes that drifted through the air were filaments of light
that were emitted from the heated bulb in the middle of the room. There was
something impossibly romantic about imagining ships emerging from the inky
sea and all the people that they carried—lovers and heroes and tragic,
homebound men with kind eyes and rough beards who watched the land grow
closer through rusting looking-glasses.
It took us weeks to move in. The sitting room of the house was the
common area to which plastic containers and cardboard boxes were opened,
37
unpacked, disassembled, and endlessly siphoned in and out. I set up my room
(at the very top of the house, with a perfect view of the lighthouse) exactly like
my room in the country, with all my books piled neatly and the glass figures
that my grandmother had given me all lined up on my dresser. She had passed
away the summer after I turned twelve, but I didn’t cry about her death until I
was much older. Back then, even though I was well into my teenaged years
when we first moved to the lighthouse, I didn’t think that there was anything
sad about deat8h. I thought of myself as so selfless that I could deal with the
pain of not being able to speak to my grandmother, as long as she was happy.
And I firmly believed that she was deliriously, impossibly happy wherever she
was. Only later did I think about what it really meant to die. Now when I think
about my grandmother, I picture myself in one of those questioning rooms in
police departments that you see in movies. The ones with the window that the
people inside the room can’t see out of, but everyone outside the room uses to
look directly into the space where the criminal is being interrogated. I don’t
know if she is happy now, I didn’t even know if she was happy when she was
alive. I just hope that she can see me.
I have memories of that summer, but only a few stick out in my mind.
Most of them are just bits of color, points of light in my peripheral vision.
Occasionally I’ll remember something specific, like how once, when I was
walking home, a silver charm shaped like a sun fell off the bracelet that my
38
mother had given me and into the gutter. I sat there for three hours, using long
sticks and bits of dirty string that I had found on the side of the road to try to
retrieve it. I can also remember other things, like making friends with girls who
wore their hair long and insisted on calling me by my full name—never any of
the nicknames that I assured them I preferred. “Is-a-belle!” they would call, like
my teachers back in the country, even as they addressed each other by
shortened, uncomplicated pet names. I also remember other things, like a rock
in our back yard that held the heat of the sun even as the evening drew itself
over everything—and a day that I spent outside the town, at a river with water
that felt like cool sunlight.
But I remember one moment in particular with unparalleled clarity. It
was at the end of summer, and by that time I had already established a routine
for myself. I had gotten a job selling little glass bottles that had pieces of paper
for people who were taking boats out to sea. Tourists bought them so that they
could write a note and toss it overboard—their very own message in a bottle. I
found this idea, though somewhat cheesy, incredibly appealing. Every day, I
watched as thoughts and desires were freed and swept away by the sea. In my
mind, I imagined a record of the hopes and feelings and messages of the world
existing at the bottom of the sea—each thought encased glass, preserved
forever in the current of the waves.
39
Every evening, after the last sliver of orange sun disappeared under the
horizon line, I would pack the little blue-green bottles and small scrolls into
cushioned boxes and lock them away in a little silver briefcase. At the end of
my shift, I watched as the town slowly withdrew and became silent. The only
people left were usually the few stragglers—tourists who had missed their bus
to the city, teenagers traipsing across the boardwalk and into the night, men
trailing wisps of cigar smoke who came out to the water to smoke or think or
do both at once—but that night there was no one there except for a man in
dirty breeches with a yellow windbreaker fastened under his chin. When he
entered the pool of light created by the streetlamps, I saw the lines on his face
and the creases branching out from the corner of his eyes. When he saw me, a
girl in the shadows clutching a green glass bottle, he walked over and asked me,
in a voice that was so quiet it sounded like a whisper, what I was selling.
And so I told him about the messages in a bottle. I told him how people
bought them so that they could give a piece of themselves to the sea and how I
was sorry if it sounded cheesy and how I’ve only wrote one message but that I
loved the idea. And he stood there listening. As I spoke, the other merchants
slowly packed their things and abandoned their tables. When I was done, the
man with the lines on his face asked tipped his head into the light and asked
me, “What did you give to the sea?”
40
I looked at him, with his brown skin and sea-glass eyes and tattered
windbreaker and I thought for a moment that he looked like the sailors who I
imagined being beckoned into the harbor by my lighthouse—back when it still
held light. And because it was evening and because everything was empty and
because I sort of was too, I told him about my message. I told him about my
grandmother and how I missed her light and how I missed the little brown burs
that stuck to my shirt when I used to play in her garden and how I missed the
person who she made me become. I also told him, so quickly and breathlessly
that I’m not even sure he understood my words, about how I was terrified for
the rest of my life to start and how I cried when I lost the sun charm that my
mother gave me and I ripped the maple leaf to mark the loss of my old life
because I was afraid that if I didn’t attach meaning to the charm and the leaf
and about a thousand other things in my life then they would have no meaning
at all. And so I stood there, telling my story to a man who I only trusted
because I thought the wrinkles on his face made him look kind.
After I had finished I remember a silence that stretched itself out to the
horizon and a feeling that reminded me of the sun. I watched him draw a pen
out of his coat with shaking hands. When he held it out to me, I grasped the
cold object between my fingers and looked up at him, confused. “Will you
write something for me?” he asked.
41
He raised his hands, slowly, to me. I saw the callouses on his palms and
the freckles on his wrist and the unsteady, jerking movements that his quivering
hands made. And then I understood.
I drew out a paper and drew the pen across the paper in the shape of the
words that he spoke—the words that he wanted to live on the bottom of the
sea.
Alice—
Do you remember the time when you said that you were afraid to go snorkeling
because you were afraid that you wouldn’t want to come up for air? You told me, all those
days ago, that you had never seen anything more beautiful than the dawn light at the bottom
of the ocean. I never quite understood what you meant—just like I never understood a
thousand different things about you—but I read, in one of your old books, that the feeling of
not wanting to come up from the bottom of the sea is called the rapture of the deep. The book
gave some scientific explanation for it, but I know that you lost yourself down there because
you were one of the few people in the world who had the gift of giving yourself up to something
greater. Well, now I’ve lost you and the world is a lot less spectacular from where I am. But
now I’m giving this—giving you—to the ocean.
I just hope that you can see me. Can you do that for me, Alice? Just look after me before I
step out of time and into your arms.
Goodbye.
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And there, in that moment that became greater and more incredible even
as it faded out of existence, I felt the pulse of the world vibrating in the sea-
soaked air. I don’t remember how the note got into the bottle or who put the
cork in. All I remember is seeing the man walk to the edge of the ocean and
watching the bottle fall into the waves. And under that great abyss that pulsed
and spun and beat wildly to the rhythm of humanity, the old man walked off
towards the ghostly town—his dark silhouette growing translucent against the
sky and, before I knew it, he too was swallowed by the haze of the earth.
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