Nine Months Ashore
三島　和希
Kazuki Mishima

I imagine that she came to the light unwillingly in her hospital room overlooking the cheapest motels in town, but I never asked how she felt that morning. I can only guess how she felt from her revelations of other moments.

At night we strayed far from the glowing plasma adorning the arcades and ice cream stands, entrusting our fatigued eyes and weary feet to the gentle caress of the ocean water that promised unseen islands and continents beyond its smooth horizon. She told me one night that we were walking away from the lights because they reminded her of the tubes of electrified neon that had mocked her ineffective resistance to the unheeding fingers of violation.

Only through my experience with her did I discover the unforgiving intensity of the soft-edged glow lining the sandy shore and the tenacity of the odor of kelp that pervaded the rocky end of the public beach where she began to vomit on one morning stroll. I first realized that she was pregnant holding her arm as I watched the foam issue forth from between her tensed lips to the sharp, clattering rocks around a clear tidal pool. Later we sat atop the boulders against the storm wall and the product of her illness drift away in the cool, gently rolling seawater that embraced the hot, abused rocks.

“Will you stay here?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

Worry contorted her face. “After college... Do you think you'll stay here?”

“I don't know...”

“I don't see how I could ever live away from the sea.”

Winter came early that year, so by the time she could feel the child's movements within her we were unimpeded by sunbathers on our walks together. School had been tough for me lately, but she faced more suffering in her absence from the classrooms and hallways that comprised her normalcy.

“I'm sorry,” she told me the day I let her borrow my sweater before she started wearing her own.

“Why?”

“We can't really be close at all.” I had touched her only once, to help her stand while she vomited at the edge of the tidal pool.

“That's no reason to be sorry.”

She anticipated the first snowfall at the water's edge, but this, unlike the coldness of the air, came unusually late.

I left school early when I was told that she was giving birth. I sat unmoving but deeply occupied in the waiting room. When I finally visited her beside her hospital bed, her daughter had been taken to another room. Unlike the window she had faced that morning when she had returned to the light, the window here revealed the softly pulsing seashore – and the first snowfall to grace its visage that winter her daughter came forth.

There were “complications”, of course, but the baby is now a healthy child, unaware that “Mom and Dad” are her biological grandparents or that I, her “uncle” without ties to her family by blood or marriage, first glimpsed the heart of motherhood in her nine months ashore before she disembarked into a sea of light.