for Mom, the fearless creator
Olivia walked up the spine where waves met sand and wished the grains under her toenails were words. She would go home, swing her legs over her desk, and shake the syllables on to paper. She hadn’t written in three months.
For her entire memory, people had loved Olivia’s writing. Teachers’ compliments extended across her history like boxcars. She pictured her career cutting over purple plains where stories sprinted along the tracks before heaving themselves in. Olivia knew she was good. Good and frozen.
A salty overripe-ness needled Olivia’s nostrils. She squinted up the beach at a smooth, gray mass that grew bluer with each step, materializing like dew in the morning haze. She stood over the sleeve of muscle and wondered how the shark had died. It didn’t seem to have any wounds. The eyes had a bulbous blackness that made them look the size of teacups. Did sharks have eyelids? Olivia couldn’t remember.
She wedged her palms underneath the carcass and heaved, propelling the shark on to its back. She hoped the fin didn’t snap. Its belly was a softer white than she expected, more feather than snow. It felt papery yet sticky, like flattened honeycomb. She pressed her fingers into its throat and felt for a poem. She had walked through amazing moments like this one all summer, letting them wrap around her like a spider web. But when she went to her journal, nothing seemed to stick.
She avoided her desk like a bad memory, busying herself with bike rides and elaborate cooking projects. Three tubs of slightly varied pimento cheese recipes cluttered the beach house refrigerator. Mary said the one with jalapenos was the best, but Olivia liked Mary’s original recipe. The secret was rice vinegar.
Olivia never called her mother “Mary” out loud; it would not be well-received. She was shocked by the way her northern friends spoke to their mothers. They cackled and swore and talked about sex. Olivia’s old New Yorker roommate said that her mom—“Cherie”—was her best friend. Mary wasn’t cold by any means; she commanded a certain type of respect, was all. Olivia wondered if the shark was a mother. Its genitalia were too subtle to guess.
She rolled the shark back over and made her way to the boardwalk, where she stepped carefully over dislodged nails. When she got to the family beach house’s bright blue door, she paused and mentally clicked together a schedule. She would open the door, say hello to Mary, and beeline for her journal. She would write one damn poem about a dead, glorious shark. It would be about how the world is rough but its skin was smooth. The shark would be a metaphor for a sanctuary. Was that too much? She didn’t want the poem to seem forced.
She exhaled and pushed the door open. The beach house always smelled more like sand than the actual beach. Mary looked up from her easel.
“Did you see the shark?” she prodded, eyes dancing. Mary beat the sunrise every morning.
“Yeah,” said Olivia. “Pretty crazy.” She didn’t want to bring up the poem idea lest it dart away like all the others.
“Crazy doesn’t cover it,” said Mary. “She was otherworldly.” Her wrist was making little twitches, calling forth Monet-style smears, no doubt. Her cheeks glowed.
Olivia couldn’t resist. She stepped over a box of brushes and turned to stand behind Mary’s left shoulder. The painting featured the shark, of course, who had taken on a more rugged existence than the scene the two women saw. It was surrounded by shoots of lemon zest and succulent green bending violently outward from its body. Bursts of pink scattered through the portrait like chipmunks. Mary had laid the shark to rest in a bed of pure color.
It was good, like all the others. The walls of the beach house were choking with the thickly-laden canvasses of Mary’s summer. She finished one every couple of days.
“I love it,” said Olivia, who felt like her tongue had been pickled. She tried to swallow the sourness that had collected in her throat since June. Mary smeared happily, articulating the bottom left-hand corner of the portrait. Olivia sat on the floor and caught her folded knees in the corners of her elbows. Morning sun licked the sand under her big toenail.
“I can’t write,” she said.
Mary lifted the brush from the canvas, looked down, and said, “Sure you can.” She dipped the brush in lime and went back to work.
“Not like you can paint,” said Olivia.
Mary rolled her eyes. “I took two art classes in college and ask for supplies for my birthdays,” she said. “These would never actually sell. Your writing, on the other hand, could be in journals.”
“It hasn’t been,” said Olivia.
“Well, is that why you write? So that people tell you you’re good at it?”
“No,” said Olivia, although she wasn’t sure.
Mary added another pink polyp to the mixture. “People don’t usually praise me for my paintings,” she said. “It bothered me when I first picked it back up. I painted a sand dollar that had sea oats sprouting through it that I thought was really good. I entered it in contests and tried to sell it at festivals. No one gave a shit. You know where it is now?”
Olivia did, but she waited.
“It’s above my bed,” said Mary. “Because I love it. The colors are spectacular.”
She painted for a few minutes in silence. Sunlight rubbed its way up Olivia’s foot.
“Write about the shark,” Mary suggested. Olivia fought the urge to roll her eyes.
“I thought about it already,” she said.
“So why aren’t you writing anything down?” asked Mary, genuinely curious.
Olivia didn’t have an answer. If she had to guess, she didn’t want to feel strangled by what once made her happy. If she sat down at her journal like she promised herself she would, the blank paper would stare at her, rudely, for thirty minutes. Then, once she caught a word, the paper would melt and drip to her thighs and poison her blood. And the world would have one less poem.
The urge to cry crept and sprung, digging its claws into Olivia’s shoulders. She held her mouth in a careful line and tried not to hear the words spray painted on the walls of her brain: This summer was a waste, and you might never write again.
“I don’t know what to write about the shark,” said Olivia, her voice cracking on the last word.
Mary did not fight the urge to roll her eyes. “It’s not about you, Olivia,” she said. She pointed to the peacefully blurry shark. “What would she want you to write about her?”
The body thudded into Olivia’s brain. She saw the shark swimming, the dutifully chaotic muscle bend. A shark smells a drop of blood within a mile and spends her whole life in motion, Olivia remembered. She moves in order to breathe. The rhythm of the oceanic ecosystem is held in place by the shark. Elementary school facts swam into her brain with a new level of importance. Science classes involving food chain posters played on a reel, and she remembered a short story she wrote about a shark named Shelly who was friends with a jellyfish. All the while, the resurrected shark painted slow circles around her thoughts. Olivia gently learned how the shark didn’t need her in order to become a poem.
Mary was working more lemon into her portrait. Olivia felt assaulted and touched by the pure yellow of it. She stood and left the cloud of Mary’s oil paint, moving quietly to her room. She sat in front of her journal and gazed at the page. Her tongue tasted like honeycomb.