Bubbles and Clay

Bubbles and Clay

Isabella Rodrigues

I was born near the Ocean. On the Ocean? To the Ocean? By? From?I like to think:

My father was a fisherman, dangling his rubber legs off the side of a boat, blowing smoke out of a dusty pipe. My mom was the Sea, slippery and rageful.

I feel wrong, split in two. Down the middle.

I am a human woman, with all the normal functions. A heart, brain, lungs, etc. Quite boring. Like my mother—my feet are not made for shoes. Like my father—my eyes are forever hungry. I am made of clay and bubbles. Every tide fills me up, but only ever halfway. One leg stands in

the mud while my mouth bellows out delicious sea foam. Perhaps I am a fish. I gape open-mouthed at the full moon and feel a concerning tug to... lay eggs? Something strange like that. Sometimes, I sweat vegetable seeds and oak acorns, and other times, I disintegrate into tiny wisps of salt and blow into the north wind. When I am in the transient in-between place,

I stink like chopped up bass on bloody pink ice.

I have roots underneath my heels. They like water, but not the smelly pond kind. But I think sea water kills them too. I don’t know what is good for them.

I find myself licking salt. My tongue itches for it and then my humanness screams and scolds me for this. DRINK WATER! It yells. It’s quite boring.

One day I’m sure the mud in my veins will dry up and I’ll turn into bubbles. I do not think I will turn back into the Sea, for that is my mother.

Maybe I’ll go to the moon.

The human heart has blood and oxygen in it. I have those. But, a creature lives there too. It hunches grumpily with a crooked face and laps up anything I give it. Fast and greedily. As if I haven’t fed it for weeks. It sits and makes sure I don’t swim out too far into the brine and seaweed. It keeps me churning. Churn, churn. Too much churn, never enough release. I never

crash, just boil. Oh, how I want to smash hard and stupid against a wall. Shake the trees and scare the people. I wish to collide violently on the shore and say HELLO! But scary. Like a horrifying, but friendly, monster. And then a person curious enough would wade in and take a peek at me and maybe I would drag them down to the dark where my human eyes couldn’t see, but my non-humanness spirit could feel this person. Maybe the creature inside my heart wouldn’t eat them up so quickly.

That is bubble talk.

Clay would remind me to pull up grass and crush beetles into my eyes. To pick dirt off my knees. A pumpkin person does not like salt.

But I adore salt. I eat it out of the box. I take handfuls of the stuff and shove it down my human throat, trying to return myself.

I think my mother slit her throat to get her gills back. For what may the pained and angry Sea do when dried in soil?

I will bleed out if I follow her. My human organs will shit themselves. And the creature in my heart will consume me out of starvation.

I try to keep it at bay with dreams and wishes. It is getting harder to bargain with. If I am bubbles, someone will pop me, expand me, or blow me to the sky and I’ll unwillingly scream and probably miss home.

If I am clay, someone will wash me off their hands, down the sink and spend the rest of the day picking me out from under their nails.

So I am here with low tide. In and out and neither. Stuck in the horrible in-between. Dipping strawberries into salt. Pouring syrup on seaweed.

The thing in my heart remains.Wanting.