Free The Seas by Samantha Hunt Page B

I cover where I am the bluest. I hear him breathe and he walks in. He doesn’t move. He stands a bit frozen and stares like a bridge between his eyes and my body. Eventually the bathwater calms down. I tuck my chin to my chest. “What are you looking at?” I ask him. Jude sees but doesn’t answer. “Get out,” I say but he doesn’t move. I shut my eyes. I feel like my skin has never seen the light of day. Jude imagines that without moving. Like he’s the first. I lift my head. I don’t want to be the Mormon girl in love with Donny Osmond. I listen to him breathe and I stare at the oldness of his hands. He watches me until the air between us feels as thick as electricity right at the transformer.
    He starts to tell me a story while he stares at me. He has a seat without looking away. “There was a town north of the Kuwaiti border. It was tiny. We only knew it by number coordinates, not by name,” Jude says. He rubs his hands across his thighs. I imagine I am between them. “They didn’t tell us the name on purpose because bad things had happened there, things that broke the rules of war. Its coordinates were on a list, an Army list of words we were never supposed to say, so that if we ever encountered someone from the media and we didn’t know they were with the media we wouldn’t slip and mention, ‘fear,’ or, ‘intestines,’ or, ‘bodies hung out to dry like laundry on a clothesline,’ or the name of that town, or any other phrase that was on the official list of things we weren’t supposed to say.” Jude looks at me. “My palms are getting wet,” he says and looks down at them. “I feel like your name was on that list. Like you are off limits. Like if I say your name or if I touch you, I’d get court-martialed, found guilty, and executed.”
    I don’t say anything.
    He stares and stares. “Sorry,” he says and starts to back out the door. “I thought there was something wrong with you,” he says. “Your mother told me you had been in the water forever.”
    I stand naked, looking at Jude, concentrating on becoming one hundred percent water so that I could slip down the drain and out to sea or at least I could slip down Jude’s wrong pipe and fill his lungs, lovingly washing away every breath he takes.

THE KNIGHT
    I feel a bit funny after Jude has left, like I forgot to trick him in some way that I was supposed to know but had forgotten or had never learned because I’m not from here. Instead I felt like I had been tricked. Again. And an old defense from grade school welled up in me. I went up to our roof. I hadn’t been there in awhile. Not since the day four boys in my tenth grade class covered the hair on my head with duct tape. They told me it was a scientific experiment so I let them do it.
    When I was young I retreated here rather often because from the peak of the roof I would will myself to imagine the entire town getting flooded and filled as the icecaps melted, as the ocean crept higher and higher. From my roof I thought I’d watch those boys sputter and drown. It wasn’t an experiment. I thought if they tried to grab hold of my roof while the water was rising I would walk over to the rain gutter edge and squish their pale fingers underneath my tennis shoe, though usually in my imagining I had on my father’s steel-toed work boots because they were more effective at finger crushing.
    The dormer window out to the roof is already open so I swing one leg through and the rest of my body follows. My mother is already sitting on the roof. “Mama,” I say very quietly at first, scared to startle her when we’re up so high.
    “Hi,” she says while I scramble up the incline to where she is seated. A few old houses in town have widow’s walks—the small square rooms or flat platforms built into a roof so that women left behind by fishermen husbands could look out to see if their men’s ships were ever going to come in. We don’t have a widow’s walk, so my mother sometimes