Or Maybe They’re Sharks
By Sean M. Sanford
Remember that shit? We were off the coast of a tiny village. No longer in Puerto Vallarta where English was confetti’d across the city. No one here spoke a word of it and most of the public looked at us with smiles that echoed a twang of malice. No one seemed to understand why we were here. Particularly whenever your dad tried speaking in Spanish.
His every sentence to you and I, on the other hand, seemed to harbor a tone: On land, we wandered. At sea, he led.
We allowed our migration to stretch and wander. In this part of town, the canvas contained strokes. We could see the shore, some obscene hotel that pampered rich people on the beach. The three of us looked like drifting stowaways. Inspiring disgusted sneers from the upper crust. Fuck em’ we said. We heard them speaking English. We’d ensnared a sheen of oddity, in a land that tolerated aliens. And that gust of America saw us as bad medicine.
That night, bobbing in the bay, voices drifted in from the shore. We sat and could hear something coming from the hotel. It was a play. The boisterous waves of a musical in Spanish. It was an ill-fit score that fluttered in from a world of beauty, grazing by a chamber that had wanted us gone, and we loved it because the captain hated it. He seemed to be re-discovering his irritation at the birth of every moment, like the night itself was a constant mosquito.
We tried to embrace the depths of carelessness. Smiles, cigs, beers. Laughs. And the captain let himself shoulder his desire to pummel us.
We weren’t children anymore. We just really shined to act like it in those weeks. It was our only option sometimes on the boat, and we embraced what breaths we could enjoy.
A different night. Within another from all the elsewhere’s. Would you look at that. Look at what? Look at the, well, nothing –the nothing. The darkness that has painted the world. I’ve never seen a sky like this. Yeah, it’s a new moon. More like a new night, a new life that has just been birthed. Made of its own absence. And so, a blank canvas. Of complete void. Except for us, trying to drift. To paint the night. Yeah but would you look? Still, the darkness remains.
What’s Venus De Milo’s favorite book? What? A Farewell to Arms. Funny. There; we just painted the canvas with humor. I’ll take that.
The ocean was still and we were around the horn, on your dad’s boat, in isolation off part of the coast of Mexico. Mexico, can you believe it? What a trip. Where was it we breezed though? Somewhere that resembled nowhere we’d ever seen. Adrift and free, finally. Yet we merely sit. Brothers of different blood like a river flowing into the sea. Comatose beneath the palm.
We sat up again at night, like two friends resting on an island, out at sea, just beyond reach. It all felt haunted and great and nautically symbolic.
We had only the energy to smile, at the reams of chaos soaring to the heartbeat of a sonic rhythm. It was an unfamiliar language, but we could appreciate the rhymes. It surrounded us with a wonderment upon the island of grime on which we bobbed.
“I’m the captain. You guys are my help.” As it has been for both of us since we were kids. Our youth remained, atremble and arrested.
We both reclined on the deck of that sailboat. The night’s descent felt like the whole world folding to the pulse of the waves. We smoked cigs. Sipped on beers. Laughed at the planet while our captain slept. But the solitude felt rejuvenating. Until we heard a whale take a breath beside us. I tried to find something in that: I think your dad lead us to a pack of whales. You looked into the reflective ink. And said gravely, or maybe they’re sharks.
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