Free Swallow the Ocean by Laura Flynn

a chance and told Sara. “I don’t think I breathe.” I knew as soon as the words were out of my mouth that I sounded like a dope.
    “You don’t have to think, dumdum, you just do it. If you didn’t, you’d be dead.”
    Out loud I knew she was right. Inside I wasn’t convinced. I went on testing, but kept the results to myself. Half terror, half visions of grandeur—as we made our way back to California, I too waited and watched for more signs.
    When we got home Big Baby was waiting there for me, lying on my bed just where I’d left her. Only she seemed like a stranger to me. A few months later we moved to a new apartment, and I lost track of Big Baby. Much later, I found her again, naked and abandoned at the bottom of a cardboard box in a closet. The sight of her nearly broke me. I sobbed uncontrollably into her soft belly, stricken, not because I’d lost her, but because I’d forsaken her.

Chapter Five
    OUR NEW APARTMENT was on West Clay Park—a three-block cul-de-sac that sloped down 24th Avenue across two blocks lined with beautiful homes, each one unique, with trees and flowering plants in the front yards. The street turned and came back up 22nd Avenue to Lake Street. The neighborhood was more affluent than our old one. We were already strange here: the only kids who lived in an apartment building and the only ones who went to public school. The apartment was much smaller than the old house had been—but because we owned the whole building, it was a step up in the world. There were six units in all, occupied by people who shared walls and ceiling with us. Buying this building was pure audacity on my father’s part. He leveraged everything else we had, our house on 12th Avenue and his shares in another building downtown. When you came down to it, all we had amounted to debt, which is how real estate in California works: you turn a little debt into a lot of debt, and then you wait for everything to appreciate.
    I saw the apartment for the first time the day before we moved in. It was clear of furniture. Sky blue wall-to-wall carpet had just been laid down from the long front hallway, straight through the living room all the way to the bay windows that looked out on the Golden Gate Bridge. While my parents poked around, making sure the windows opened and closed after the new paint job, Sara and I ran up and down the track, arms out from our sides, soaring through the open space of our new pad in our thin-soled blue Keds. We ran at full speed, stopping dangerously just short of the full-length windows each time, leaving our fingerprints on the panes.
    Bliss like this had its price. Later it was discovered that one or both of us had stepped in dog shit and trailed it up and down, again and again across the brand-new carpets. I don’t know for sure if it was Sara, or me, or both of us—but she took the blame and I slipped through unnoticed, a pattern that would repeat. The carpets had to be shampooed—my father was very angry. The apartment was already soiled.
    We had a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and we would gather for sunsets in the living room. We watched the reflective red drama light up the Bay, then deepen down into night. Sometimes in the middle of the day, my father would call, “Hey, girls, come look at this.” We’d run to his side to see a tanker, a barge, or, rarest of all, a cruise ship, all lit up, gliding through the Golden Gate. My father stood leaning against the tall window frame. We waited for the boats to pass under the bridge. When my sisters and I tired of the hushed feeling, we slipped back to our games. My father would stay there, his right arm raised against the window frame, his left hip jutting out to the side, gazing after those ships until they reached the open sea.
    One evening as we sat at the dinner table, Sara raised her fork to me in a silent challenge. I smiled my assent and piled as large a hunk of steak as I thought I could manage onto my fork. We