All Day Is a Long Time by Sanchez David

Author:Sanchez, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

9

I WAS LIKE A MOLE. I hadn’t seen the sun, really, for a long time. Not the real sun, the August sun. I was pale, and I was soft, and I craved outside. So, the first chance I got, I rode the bus over the Intracoastal and went to the beach. It took me a while to get there, even though it was only a few miles away. I was still taking my medicine, so I was practically asleep on the bus. I got off and the place was teeming with tourists. It made my head hurt. There were families and couples and white noses; there were seagulls eating trash and making their boomerang calls, back and forth like taunting laughter. I stood by the fence around a condo pool and watched a heron stalk on the ledge, its long, crooked neck and legs, its sharp beak pointed toward the water, waiting hungrily for a fish to show up in the clear blue chlorine.

I sleepwalked over to the pier and saw a little kid with a Coke can handline, the fishing line tied to the tab and wrapped around the red can. It was some kind of hood science; the kid couldn’t have been more than eight, and he was sitting there with his legs over the pier and his chest against one of the wooden railing posts. His arms were wrapped around the post and holding the can out toward the water. I sat there watching him, hoping he would get a bite because I wanted to see him bring something in with that rig. Nothing happened, so I went out to the hot sand and the green water. I waded in and let the water kill my senses and salt my brain. I floated like bait, waiting for something to grab me, and it did, a memory of when I learned how to swim. When my dad took me out here in the ocean, the Gulf, rather. Salty and warm. I was four or five and kicking upright, violent kicks to keep myself from falling under, and he backed up away from me. Swim to me, he said. And I did, or I tried to. No instructions, no strokes, just swim to me, necessity the mother of invention, I had to invent swimming from scratch, as if I was the first person to ever venture out into the sea, flailing and propelling myself with sheer will. And just as I get to him, he backs away, and I am stuck in that moment, fear and suspension, my father farther than how he seemed, me searching for him, eyes open in the sudden flashes of water above and below, salt burning them, moving into my nose, down my throat. Forward, pushing myself forward, him, leisurely backing up, moving the bar, the way he made enrichment harder, just as I’d find it easy, he’d buy a higher-level book, just as he upped the number of push-ups I had to do as soon as I got a handle on them.

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