Free The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott

ocean coming from a seashell.

 
    S hortly before his tenth birthday, James broke his hand on the oak tree that devastated the sidewalk outside my house. I stood with my legs planted firmly, hands slicing the air decisively, instructing him on how to throw a perfect punch at the bare bark. James’s mother couldn’t believe her son had been convinced, as my right hand had been wrapped in pink plaster for two weeks at that point. My father had been my instructor, had duct-taped a throw pillow to the tree, not thinking any ten-and-a-half-year-old’s first attempt would make any serious contact.
    I’d been physically pained but enthralled with my newfound power. I fell asleep in my new cast, fingering the ER bracelet, while my father cried down the hallway and thought of what he might say to my mother, to the woman who had birthed such a good punch. He thought he might apologize for his stupidity. He thought, or knew, that she would find it all hilarious. She’d call him an idiot and go to fix two more drinks, but the fifth would be gone, so she’dwalk to the corner store and take so long returning that he’d begin to worry, but she would just be making small talk with the quiet-smiling Korean couple who owned the convenience store down the street. She would come back with a noisy paper bag and some little joke present for him: Jesus-scented incense, extra-large condoms in ludicrous gold wrappers. Then they would fuck in their immaculately white bedroom until the sun peeked in the curtains, her mouth open and smiling the whole time. When it was over, she’d tell him oh honey, oh lamb, this life.
    But sex with the dead is always unsatisfying, and even after his forcedly enthusiastic efforts in masturbation, even when he tried to think of the elegantly weary and olive-skinned mother of the brothers down the street, his testicles were left as aching and sad as the rest of him.

 
    O ur teenage years are just as engraved as the rest in my memory, but they are stories I am hesitant to speak about with anyone who wasn’t present: because they seem boastful, fantastic, no doubt exaggerated; because in telling them we seem to lose credibility as the responsible adults we tell ourselves and the world that we are now.
    The river, which we sometimes named as the catalyst for all of it, wasn’t really a river. It was as an estuary, which is a fancy name for slough; it was referred to as a creek until 1959, when the town rallied for some national official or another to give it license as a river. Our parents were fine with calling it that, despite nothing about it being fresh or hurried, and just as accepting of what it spawned: walking bridges dotted with tiny lights, waterside restaurants that didn’t charge for the newspaper and where people spent whole mornings sitting, antique store after antique store.
    Separating the cafés where they sat with us on their knees, adjusting their sunglasses as we squirmed, was thecorpse of a railroad that hadn’t run since the town reigned as the egg capital of the world and every family had at least three chickens. Once we were old enough to walk, we tiptoed the steel lines in proud demonstration of newfound balance and secretly, gleefully hoped a train might still be coming. The rails are fenced off now, the wood more decomposed than not, and any drunk from one of the many nearby bars who is foolish enough to adventure onto them will most likely punch a foot through the sweet rot and fall fifteen feet into the filthy, barely moving water.
    It’s just one murky winding euphemism, really. Everyone who lives there calls it the river as if in the summer there are lemonade stands, beach towels, the smell of sunscreen, lobster-colored children, young mothers leafing through magazines. The wood of the docks decays slowly as the shopping carts sink into the silt and grime beneath the surface, groaning occasionally and remorsefully to the carcasses of fish and forty-ounces.
    When the tide was low