Shallow Enough to Walk Through by Marissa Reaume

Author:Marissa Reaume
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: NeWest Press
Published: 2013-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

I peel the layer of protective plastic from the screen of my new laptop. The way the desktop images come into a clearer focus reminds me of winter mornings when I was in elementary school and I would stand at my front door, fogging the cold glass with warm breath before wiping my mittens across the spray of fog to reveal an icy street as I waited for Angie’s mom to pick me up. Angie’s family always had old cars with bubbles of copper rust that surfaced from beneath the paint, disfiguring it like burns on skin. I never knew where these cars came from, but there was always a new old car in September with ripped seats, floors littered with bits of colourful aluminum foil, coffee stains in cup holders, buckled door panels, and manual windows. During the last few days of August, the car would vanish and their driveway would be empty. Days later, another car on the brink of extinction would materialize beside her house. The family never commented on getting another car; they merely clicked in their broken seatbelts, adjusting straps that were now grey when they had once been burgundy.

I open a word-processing program. I’ve decided to postpone my story writing, partly because Graham Swift stole the novel that I was destined to write, but mainly because of the confrontation I had at three o’clock this morning with the rain and that googly eyed magnet. All I wanted was a glass of water and half a chocolate chip cookie. I didn’t eat my usual bedtime snack of chocolate pudding and animal crackers. I stayed late at Dan’s to take care of him and was too tired to eat when I got home. The rain had quieted since the week before, when it damaged my computer, sending me into that gadget store only to encounter Graham the salesperson who clued me into Graham the writer and his creative thievery. The glass I grabbed was the same glass I drink from almost every night. It’s on the top shelf of the cupboard between my white bowl dotted with orange cherries that I eat chocolate ice cream from and the plain blue bowl that Dan brought over to eat his potato chips in. Dan claims that my bowls are too “eccentric” with their artificial patterns and colours not found on the standardized colour wheel we were taught in ninth-grade art period. Even though I’d turned off the faucet, I heard water running into the sink as I tipped the glass and brought it to my lips. The water in my glass was disappearing faster than I could drink. There was a hole in the bottom and a tiny misshapen piece of glass lying in the sink. I dried the glass off and put it back on the shelf between the cherry and blue bowls.

I felt the seashell watching me. “What?” I snapped. “What do you want?” No answer. The rain outside instantly grew louder until it was inside the kitchen, tapping on my shoulder from within my body.

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