you’ll be trapped and miserable.” On the television, a game show contestant won a trip to Spain. “Take the low, and you’ll have a life.”
“How can it be wrong to cure people?”
White anger shot across Pop’s face. “All right, all right, ” he growled, voice rising. “If you’re going to be stubborn …!” From his wallet he removed a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle like a slice of stale cheese. “Listen, Julie, I don’t want to worry you, it might not mean anything—but look, the minute I carried you out of that clinic, somebody blew the place up.”
BABY BANK ABORTED , ran the headline. “Huh? Bombed it?” Bile climbed into your throat. “You mean, they wanted to …?”
“Probably just a coincidence.”
“Who’d want to kill me?”
“Nobody. All I’m saying is, we can’t be too cautious. If God expected you to show yourself, she’d come out and say so.”
That was years ago, eighth grade—since which time your divinity has remained wholly under control, your urge toward intervention completely in check.
Baby bank aborted. Bombed. Blown off the face of the earth like Castle Boadicea.
Reveling in your one permitted miracle, you draw a large helping of oxygen from the bay. As a gill owner, you’ll never experience the great, glorious breath a pearl diver takes on surfacing, but you’re determined to know the rest of it, everything bone and tissue offer. If your Catholic boyfriend is right, God subscribes to a spare, unequivocal ethic: body bad, soul good; flesh false, spirit true. And so in defiance you’ve become a flesh lover. You’ve become a woman of the world. Not a hedonist like Phoebe, but an epicure: it is always in homage to flesh that you devour pepperoni pizza, drink Diet Coke, admit Roger Worth’s tongue to your mouth, and savor your own briny smell while playing basketball for the Brigantine High Tigerettes. Take that, Mother. So there, Mother.
Flesh is the best revenge.
As you swim into the cave, a small cloud of blood drifts from between your thighs, quickly stoppered by water pressure. You will give credit where due. The body in which God has marooned you is the real thing, all functions intact.
Your petting zoo is defunct. Starfish, flounder, crab, lobster—all gone. Only Amanda the sponge remains, sitting in a clump of seaweed like a melancholy pumice. Thanks to Mr. Parker’s biology class, you know she is a Microciona prolifera, common to estuaries along the North American coast.
—Where’s everybody gone? you ask.
—Dead, Amanda replies. Sickness, old age, pollution. I alone have escaped. Immortality, it’s my sole claim to fame. Hack me apart, and each piece regenerates.
—I’m probably immortal too.
—You don’t look it, Julie.
—God wants me to live forever.
—Perhaps, broadcasts the sponge.
—She does.
—Maybe.
Using your feet like hoes, you furrow the sandy floor, upending stones, overturning shells, uncovering … there, beside your heel, the skeleton you first spotted at age ten. Tornadoes of sand swirl upward as, with a sudden karate chop, you behead it.
You snug the skull against your chest and float toward the filtered sunlight. How you love having a body, even a blobby one; you love your caramel skin, opulent hair, slightly asymmetrical breasts, throbbing gills. Too bad, Mother. Menstrual blood encircling you like an aura, you bid Amanda good-bye, push off from the bay bottom, and ascend through a hundred feet of salt water.
Fresh water gushed from the shower nozzle, washing away the sweat of the game but not its humiliation. Julie had played well, sinking all her free throws and chalking up fifteen points, six rebounds, and seven assists. She had stolen the ball four times. Useless. The Lucky Dogs of Atlantic City High had walked all over the Brigantine Tigerettes, 69 to 51.
She shut off the water and crept out of the shower, the most miserable point guard in the entire division.
Eerie silence reigned in the
“How can it be wrong to cure people?”
White anger shot across Pop’s face. “All right, all right, ” he growled, voice rising. “If you’re going to be stubborn …!” From his wallet he removed a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle like a slice of stale cheese. “Listen, Julie, I don’t want to worry you, it might not mean anything—but look, the minute I carried you out of that clinic, somebody blew the place up.”
BABY BANK ABORTED , ran the headline. “Huh? Bombed it?” Bile climbed into your throat. “You mean, they wanted to …?”
“Probably just a coincidence.”
“Who’d want to kill me?”
“Nobody. All I’m saying is, we can’t be too cautious. If God expected you to show yourself, she’d come out and say so.”
That was years ago, eighth grade—since which time your divinity has remained wholly under control, your urge toward intervention completely in check.
Baby bank aborted. Bombed. Blown off the face of the earth like Castle Boadicea.
Reveling in your one permitted miracle, you draw a large helping of oxygen from the bay. As a gill owner, you’ll never experience the great, glorious breath a pearl diver takes on surfacing, but you’re determined to know the rest of it, everything bone and tissue offer. If your Catholic boyfriend is right, God subscribes to a spare, unequivocal ethic: body bad, soul good; flesh false, spirit true. And so in defiance you’ve become a flesh lover. You’ve become a woman of the world. Not a hedonist like Phoebe, but an epicure: it is always in homage to flesh that you devour pepperoni pizza, drink Diet Coke, admit Roger Worth’s tongue to your mouth, and savor your own briny smell while playing basketball for the Brigantine High Tigerettes. Take that, Mother. So there, Mother.
Flesh is the best revenge.
As you swim into the cave, a small cloud of blood drifts from between your thighs, quickly stoppered by water pressure. You will give credit where due. The body in which God has marooned you is the real thing, all functions intact.
Your petting zoo is defunct. Starfish, flounder, crab, lobster—all gone. Only Amanda the sponge remains, sitting in a clump of seaweed like a melancholy pumice. Thanks to Mr. Parker’s biology class, you know she is a Microciona prolifera, common to estuaries along the North American coast.
—Where’s everybody gone? you ask.
—Dead, Amanda replies. Sickness, old age, pollution. I alone have escaped. Immortality, it’s my sole claim to fame. Hack me apart, and each piece regenerates.
—I’m probably immortal too.
—You don’t look it, Julie.
—God wants me to live forever.
—Perhaps, broadcasts the sponge.
—She does.
—Maybe.
Using your feet like hoes, you furrow the sandy floor, upending stones, overturning shells, uncovering … there, beside your heel, the skeleton you first spotted at age ten. Tornadoes of sand swirl upward as, with a sudden karate chop, you behead it.
You snug the skull against your chest and float toward the filtered sunlight. How you love having a body, even a blobby one; you love your caramel skin, opulent hair, slightly asymmetrical breasts, throbbing gills. Too bad, Mother. Menstrual blood encircling you like an aura, you bid Amanda good-bye, push off from the bay bottom, and ascend through a hundred feet of salt water.
Fresh water gushed from the shower nozzle, washing away the sweat of the game but not its humiliation. Julie had played well, sinking all her free throws and chalking up fifteen points, six rebounds, and seven assists. She had stolen the ball four times. Useless. The Lucky Dogs of Atlantic City High had walked all over the Brigantine Tigerettes, 69 to 51.
She shut off the water and crept out of the shower, the most miserable point guard in the entire division.
Eerie silence reigned in the
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