Marcus and the Tide, Receding

FRAGMENT I 

I remember you, Marcus. I remember you bending over the sand, brow furrowed, breath slow, a bead of sweat glimmering above your left eyebrow and dripping onto the stick you were carving . . . I think you were carving a stick . . . I don’t remember, because it didn’t matter what you were doing with your hands, not as much as the way you looked focusing on what you were doing with your hands, so alive, the same color as the sky, more blue than the sky, cyan boy, how old were we? Thirteen? No, twelve. I remember you. I remember walking with you, our mothers calling out to tell us it was time for dinner, but that place tightened its grip, holding us fast.

“Is that the old archaeological site?” Marcus stood and the boat bucked, and he pinwheeled his arms to catch his balance. He had tried to learn to row a boat when he was fourteen, but it hadn’t stuck. 

​

“Careful,” said the blue-velvet man. “Sit down. Breathe.” 

​

Marcus sat down. He couldn’t breathe. “I’ve found it,” he murmured. “I thought it was gone.” 

​

They weren’t at the pier in Peschiera. Not yet. The closest thing to a story that ever happened to Marcus was when the archaeological site that his best friend and he had spent their adolescence exploring had been, simply and plainly, washed out to sea one day, never to return. How did something on the edge of a lake—the same lake he grew up on and still taught on—float out to sea? He didn’t know. What weighed on his mind more was this: perhaps if he had been on it the day it had floated off into oblivion, that would have been a story. But he hadn’t. He’d been eating dinner at home, carbonara on a white kitchen plate, and had not discovered its loss until the next day. He had always felt he was meant to be on it, him and Jude together, and it would have taken them somewhere fantastic. 

​

Many stories happened to many people around him. To his niece, such as the day she was transformed into a caterpillar and spent the day metamorphosing into a butterfly, only to return to her human form the next morning, excited to tell everyone in her life the magic she’d gotten a taste of. His students, too. One of them had a prophetic dream about a nearby town flooding. He’d missed class to spread the news, bringing back a tale of his heroic deed the next day. Marcus thought of trying to study the stories—what caused them, besides the cold weather—but they seemed averse to being studied, so he accepted defeat. He envied every butterfly floating past, wondering if it was a human in the midst of a life-changing story. 

​

“Take me there,” Marcus pleaded with the blue-velvet man, “to that . . . island.” He was being unlike himself. This self he had grown into. 

The blue-velvet man nodded, and they glided through the waves.

Next