sky. We asked what it meant, to be sacrificed, and he lied and said he couldn’t explain it in English. Instead, he told us that they used to play ball barefoot in the grass like we did, and that the losers walked home without their clothes. Afterwards, we ran out of the house and played ball like the Aztecs. We ran under the sprinklers and skidded hard into our front lawns, coming up for air with dirt caked above our eyelids and the remains of our mother’s bluebells between our teeth. The losers walked home with their white shirts hung over their shoulders like flags of surrender. A week later, he showed us another photograph. It was worn at the edges and the paper was coming undone in fibers. In it, she was sitting on a wide rock by the sea, wearing a dark suit and leaning back on her elbows. The grey sun was right above her, and her eyelashes cast long shadows over her cheeks like the thin, black spines of urchins. The photograph had been folded and unfolded in the middle, and a fuzzy white line ran across her abdomen like a crack in cement. I sometimes imagined her behind the old man in her swimsuit, instead of the dress. The mackerel-patterned wallpaper of the living room showed through the open line of her stomach. When Alan’s mother gave him a goldfish for his birthday, we brought it to the old man’s house and he told us about Atlantis. Sunlight shown through the window and into the bowl, lighting the fish up like an orange christmas light. We looked at its fins and the tiny ridges going up its back, and I tried to count them while the old man told us about the drowned Greeks. About marble columns and statues at the bottom of the ocean, and frescoes of olive groves and Greek gods hidden from the light. Alan asked, “Our ocean?” “Yes, I think so,” the old man replied. Then Alan asked, with the fishbowl glowing tangerine between his hands: Is that where she is? And the old man replied, because we were young: Yes, I think so. His wife smiled from behind him, her teeth like the insides of smooth, white shells. We walked to the beach that afternoon to look for urchins under the dock. I sat with my feet over the water while the other boys dove and came up with the black animals in their hands. I held out a jar to put them in, and we watched them magnetized through the glass. Their spines moved slowly in circles, as if they were rotating individual gears from the inside. A few jellyfish made it into the jar, too, having been brought in Alan’s outstretched palms. They were boxy and harmless, and their borders ran with color like a spectrum from an oil slick. Some of them came torn apart by rudders, but still alive and pulsing in pieces. I didn’t swim that day. When the sun went down, we stood on the edge of the dock with our toes hanging off. I stood between the other boys’ rubbery shoulders and looked under the surface, thinking that the old man’s wife might rise up from the water as if out of a bath, gasping and tired of holding her breath. I wondered if she would be soaked in the yellow dress or the white, or if she had gone under the sea in her suit. The wind blew all around us, coating our hair and skin in salt. It was past curfew, but we kept looking, pointing at the water and trying to scare each other by saying that we saw her, right there, just under the wave.
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Asheville Gets Weird
by traci thompson
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