Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel

Author:Susanna Daniel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780062219602
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

JELLYFISH SEASON CAME EARLY THAT year. I was in the office and Charlie and Frankie were sitting in the rocking chairs on the porch, taking turns with a pair of binoculars. Through the window, I heard Charlie say, “What is it?” When I looked out, I saw Frankie make the sign we’d learned, one hand against the other, pulling away and moving back again.

“What’s that?” Charlie said.

I blurted, “Jellyfish!”

“They’re early,” said Charlie when I came out to the porch.

I couldn’t see them at first, but a moment after they appeared the water was thick with them. They came in a wind sock pattern, a leviathan in aggregate, dense at the start before petering out. Charlie told us this was called a bloom, that it happened every summer, usually not until August. It was still only mid-July, but there had been a rash of small storms in the Atlantic, and they’d washed in prematurely.

We went down to the dock to watch them advance. These were moon jellies, the umbrellas cloudy along the rims and a bud of pink at the heart. Before the first one crossed in front of the dock, there was a flurry in my peripheral vision, and I turned to see Charlie drop his shirt and dive into the water. Frankie looked up at me and I gripped his shoulders. Charlie surfaced, facing the advancing battalion.

I called, “What are you doing?”

“Swimming!”

He dove again. When he came up, he was in the thick of the bloom, less than a foot from a jellyfish in every direction. He dove again and came up again in a different place. Each time he came up, he looked around to get his bearings, keeping his arms in close and staying buoyant using just his legs, and once—he was yards down the channel by this time, hemmed in on every side—he gingerly lifted one arm to wave. Frankie waved back. The look in Frankie’s eyes as he watched Charlie was of pure amazement.

There was a feeling I’d had several times in my life, including when I realized I was in love with Graham: it was the smidgen of sadness that, at least for me, always accompanies happiness. The disquieting underbelly of loss that comes with getting something you badly want. The thing I’d always understood, even before my mother got sick, was that anything started will inevitably end, anything loved will be lost. I suppose it was possible that Frankie could see the dark underside of joy in my eyes when he looked up at me. Charlie was too distant to see it. He’d reached the far side of the bloom unharmed, and was treading back up the channel behind the jellies, like a shepherd. All he could see from that distance were my arms beckoning him back to us, my mouth open in laughter.

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