Free The Seas by Samantha Hunt Page A

way I see the world is more super than a policeman who charges me $55 for a U-turn in a dead intersection. If they asked him what he saw he’d say, “a car, a light, a solid line.” That’s not super vision. But ask me what I saw. From here he looks like, Head. Brick. Head brick. Headbrick headbrickheadbrick.
    “You hear me?” the policeman says. “Back to town.” Jude doesn’t answer but turns his truck around. We head back to town, defeated, silent, and scared.

NO NAME
    Even though Jude is much older than I am he still seems just right. I try to convince him of the fit by saying, “See that old man? He eats dinner alone at Friendly’s almost every night,” or, “You’re an Aquarius too? All this time. You’re an Aquarius too? Jude, I’m Aquarius. I never knew,” or when he traces a path of blue blood just below the skin on my face I say, “I have got more just like that one. I’m nineteen,” I tell him and I mean I’m old enough. “I’m nineteen,” I tell him and he groans.
    There is a woman in town who once was so in love with Donny Osmond that she became a Mormon to be like him. Now that she is in her thirties she is still a Mormon and Donny Osmond hasn’t cut a popular album in years.
    This woman’s story makes me feel rot in all things I touch. I try to distract myself from thinking of Jude because I don’t want to end up like her. I read books or instruction manuals or cereal boxes all day. I take baths to wash him off me, but then eventually I do end up thinking of him and I’ll try to finger that Beatles song on my mother’s piano so that I can sing his name underneath my breath while I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to make it taste like metal type that would spell his name.
    I spend most of my time here waiting. Waiting to grow up. Waiting for my father to return. Waiting for Jude. Waiting for something big to happen. I wait in the water of my bathtub. I lie curled on one side under the water. In elementary school a teacher told me our bodies are ninety-five percent water. I don’t see how this could be true. Still I’m keen to believe him. Under the water I open my eyes. Because of the ocean we don’t have wells. All the ground water here is salty. We have town water that they add chlorine to so no one gets sick. The chlorine burns my eyes and some days my bath smells like a swimming pool.
    In the bath, once the water is in my ears, ninety-five percent water becomes ninety-six percent I swallow a gulp of bath water, ninety-eight percent. That is as close as I get. I sit up with my knees bent and wait for the water to still. The water breaks my shins. I do have shins. I do have legs. To be one hundred percent water I would have to get my entire body under the surface and then some. I am small but I am going to need more water.
    I move in the tub and the water begins to lap from side to side making a ruckus. Just then I hear a floorboard creak outside the bathroom door and my heart jumps up into my mouth and tastes like a bad word. I stand bolt upright in the bathwater, prepared to defend myself. I think of the gray man from the attic. I think of a bunch of bounty hunters as a swarm of black flies just outside the door. I strain to hear what is moving in the hallway but I have disturbed the water by standing. It is making a splashing noise, giving away my location to whatever spooky thing is creeping around outside the bathroom door. A floorboard creaks again, long and low, as if in pain. I breathe heavily. My blood rushes away from my lungs and flows instead to my ears that are trying so hard to hear the bad thing in the hallway that has come to get me.
    “Hey,” the bad thing says outside the door. I suck in my breath. “Hi. It’s Jude.”
    I don’t answer him. I am afraid he will walk in and I am standing naked in two feet of water. Plus I left some pee unflushed in the toilet. He opens the door but does not step inside yet. I cover my stomach with my hands and arms.