Heart Like Water by Joshua Clark

Author:Joshua Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Don’t think you’re the only one this pains for this city,” I said, “the only one who can love this place because you’re the one from here.”

“It’s me. It’s me who’s crying, Josh. Not the city.”

“Let’s just get through this thing, this whole damn thing no matter how many hurricanes they throw at us,” I said. “You know what Ken said to me down at Molly’s, he said if we can make it through this we can make it through anything. And I know we can and we will.”

“Silent and dry,” she said. “That’s how I feel. Like the city.” Tears fell to the corners of her wide lips, curled into their curling ends, and it looked like she might even smile until she looked down into her lap. “Christ, my fingers.”

“You cut yourself?”

“They’re just all wrinkled, like I was in the pool too long. But I haven’t been in. Have I?” she asked. “Hydrating our hearts, what happened to that?”

I spooned the last of my beef steak into my mouth, swallowed it with red wine, stood, walked into the pool’s deep end, and closed my eyes. As I hit bottom, I heard her fall into the water above me, felt her hands over me, taking my swim trunks off, hands on my shoulders, legs around my waist, and my eyes opened.

My bubbles went white with helicoper’s spotlight in them, then dark again, hers too now up into moon on the surface, her holding us down on the bottom, and no more bubbles and me gaping at the shrinking moon and drinking her bubbles until it burned and I started twitching, stars over her face, her face going away, coming, going, and up, coughing up water as she dragged me to the edge of the pool. I held myself there and coughed for a while, then pulled myself out, lay my head on the brick and heaved until it subsided into breath. She was standing over me in a new moon, looking down at me, and I was seeing her for first time since the storm. Naked and pale. This person.

We had each lost some weight. But Katherine never had much to lose. I pulled her down to me. New water with all the old currents. The pool water evaporated, and the sweat came, and, with the sweat, mosquitoes. We scurried upstairs, hid beneath my bed sheet. Aching sweat mingled with tears into the balcony’s planks until we lay still, still tangled into each other, listening to our blood heaving through our heads, chests, arms, legs, and sleep…And then—

A car door had slammed, I was sure of that. An engine starting. I pulled the sheet off my face, sat up. I walked to the end of the balcony where it looked over St. Peter Street in time to see her taillights round the corner.

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