Free Up Through the Water by Darcey Steinke

mornings.”
    Emily stared at the dawn suns, which were grayer and seemed to have a kind of music in them; flute, guitar.
    He set down seashore-pattern plates bordered with tiny umbrellas and beach balls. “Former tenants,” he said.
    Emily gazed to the bongs, rolling papers, and pipes scattered among his things. “You smoke a lot, don't you?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “But not like you might think.”
    She watched him lever up the fish and peek underneath.
    For months bodies had blurred in her mind. Lips, puffs of underarm hair, the swell and curve of a fleshy calf. John Berry had become familiar, like a brother it seemed; he held her in the nights. But the thought of him fell away each time she strayed. He became a blind spot with the whoosh of her clothes landing on the floor. With strangers there were ten minutes of unornamented reality. A kind of mainline black rush of being alive in the most obvious, necessary way. Her whole life was lived for these: cheek to the hollow space between back and shoulder, arm resting in arm, legs wrinkled together.
    With the spatula, Birdflower put a sword steak onto her plate and then poured butter and squares of onions over it. It smelled intoxicating. The gallon of wine swayed slightly as he raised it between them. Emily felt her hand cupped around a wineglass, the other resting on her thigh, and her back against the metal of the chair. She settled into herself and lifted her glass for more.

SEVEN
    MTV
    S nowflakes and stars, no color really, just shapes suggesting silver or white made by the pressure of his fingertips on his eyes. Lila was stretched out next to him. Her head rested on the tab of a huge Miller beer—and her arms and legs sprawled over the towel's edge. “Never?” he said pressing harder.
    “You know I've heard of ‘em. The channel we get from Nags Head just has drag racing and reruns. Every time I turn it on, those cars that look like water bugs are rounding the track.”
    “Too bad,” Eddie said, fingering the swimsuit his mother had bought him: long shorts, with a drawstring waist and bright shapes floating in canary yellow. He remembered his favorite video: Sting messing up a ballroom, then following a blonde into a Rolls-Royce.
    “What's so great about them?” Lila asked.
    “They're like movies,” he said, “but better, the best part of movies, when stuff is happening and there's music.”
    “I like listening to music,” Lila said, her eyes closed. Tiny beads of sweat gathered on her upper lip and brow. “What's so great about getting a few more channels?”
    “MTV is not a TV channel,” Eddie said.
    “You turn it on the dial, don't you? It's little color and light particles in the air like all the others.”
    “I can't explain it.” He shook his head, leaned back on his palm tree-patterned towel, and put his sunglasses back on. “It's beyond words.” Eddie saw a thin and unshaven rock star, diamond stud in one ear, singing to her. “They're like dreams,” he said.
    “Not any I've had,” Lila said and turned her head.
    “Take my word for it.”
    “Does your mother?”
    “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “If they're all that great, I'd bet she'd like them,” Lila said. She started talking about his mom the way she always did, as though she were some sort of magical person, different from everyone else on the island.
    Eddie half listened; he looked down to the public beach where kids in the surf caught tame waves as far up the sand as their father's feet. Sometimes in Tennessee—the ground covered with snow, his dog Sebastian sending wet puffs up in front of him, the ice-covered trees tingling like angels—Eddie would wonder about Ocracoke and the island winters there. He'd daydream about high waves drenching his mother's house, the water sitting for days till it froze and encased things: the red bathroom trash can with the British hunters on it; the bag of oranges near the refrigerator; his mother's soft leather