It started with a parched throat and a rubber snorkel.
The sun had been gone for a month or more, run out of town by February. She had always hated that her birthday was buried in winter, but this year was even worse than the others past – flurries starting at the end of September, temperatures dipping well below zero by Halloween, ten snow days before Thanksgiving. So much for global warming.
On her birthday, she woke to a new pair of wool socks from Jake, a faded edition of the complete works of Wordsworth from Mama, and a strange-shaped package that reminded her of a warped candy-cane. No one could say where it had come from – just that it had been left in the mostly iced-over mail box, with her name scrawled on it and nothing else.
The red-checkered wrapping paper smelled like sand and salty sunshine; out of habit, she checked her shoulders and nose to see if her skin had started to blister crimson, resisted the urge to slather on Coppertone. She thought about grit on her palms, the way her hair faded to gold-white after a long day of barefoot tide pool-hopping, and for a moment, she forgot the cold.
The snorkel itself was green. Florescent, actually, and sparkly, in addition to being sand-crusted and dented on one side. There were no surprise explanations, no strange phone calls where a mysterious stranger breathed heavily into the line at her offhand hello, no further addendums. She loved it.
Every night after she got the snorkel, she went to bed dying of thirst. No amount of water could satiate her, not even the full gallon she inhaled in a fit of desperation. Only when she managed to drift fretfully into sleep would she find relief in a world of green-blue filtered light, as she walked, shoeless, along a coral reef.
She breathed water like air, never bothered by the saltiness on the back of her tongue. It belonged there.
The fish avoided her at first, cliquish as middle-school divas, but after the first three nights they welcomed her, if not with open arms. They waved as she walked by and asked politely about her day. The friendlier ones, usually the clown fish, included her in freeze tag, swarming around her brightly and chattering away.
The crabs were silent and paranoid, skittering away as she toed at them playfully, peering around clumps of seaweed to spy from a safe distance. The one whale she met did nothing but sing haunting lullabies that brought her to tears, its loneliness as vast, as bottomless, as the darkest depths of the Atlantic.
Every morning when she woke tangled in seaweed, the soles of her feet would be briny, puckered toes dripping seawater onto the freezing hardwood floor.
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