1

2

The Rapture of the Deep

Samantha Crozier

Cover Illustration by Derek Xiao

3

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

-T.S. Eliot

4

Table of Contents

A Day in the Sun ------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 In Memoriam----------------------------------------------------------------------- 15 Chess -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 24 The Rapture of the Deep-------------------------------------------------------- 34

5

A  Day  in  the  Sun  

6

Far past the place where the black road turns into a red dust path, and

through the forest of old pines that stand green and silent in the still summer

air, there is a wide river that wanders along the trees. In the summer, the river

transforms from a place of gray snow and still water into a sparkling, summer

haven for the people from the nearby town. Men with brown, sun-stained skin

and children who talk of summer breaks spent helping their fathers chop wood

or working at the family store retreat to the river when they have a spare hour,

letting the sun tan their skin and the cool water rush over them. The people

from the town seem as if they are all crafted from the wet clay of the earth’s

crust; each one of them is warm and earthy and smells of grass and juniper

leaves.

The young man with the glass-green eyes who sits on the riverbank is no

exception. He is at the river because today is one of the rare days when he has

nothing else to do. Usually he will sit with his father in an old green truck with

peeling paint and a trunkful of lumber as they drive off to another town to

complete a job, but not today. Today is the hottest July day that the town has

ever known, so everyone has flocked to pools and lakes and rivers, desperately

seeking out cool bodies of water.

The river is crowded, but no one stops to speak to the boy with the

green eyes. The people who know him only nod or offer him a quick smile. On

7

the surface, his is the same as all the other boys from his town—he is hard-

working and unpretentious and lives with his family in a small house

surrounded by pines, but there is something about him that separates him from

the rest of the townspeople. At the age where he is too young to be called a

man and almost too old to be called a boy, he is shy and restless in equal

measure—two qualities that the people of his town find hard to understand.

Sometimes, in the mist of the sounds of saws and the smell of wood, he will

catch himself thinking about places far away—places of gleaming silver

buildings and rolling green hills where there is not a tree in sight.

But today, it is easy to push those dreams to the back of his mind. As he

lies on the grass of the riverbank, enjoying the sounds of laughter and water, he

finds that he is almost happy. The white light slants through the trees, pouring

warmth onto the cool grass and shining on the pages of the old, water-stained

book he holds up to his face. After a while, he falls asleep with the old book

next to him, lulled into unconsciousness by the relaxing delirium of warm

summer light and the music of the flowing river.

Awaking from sleep a short while later, he opens his eyes to the hot rays

of the noontime sun. The brightness blinds him, even when he looks quickly

away from the striking whiteness of the daylight to the opposite bank of the

8

river. As he blinks away the molten sunlight that spills from his eyelids, he sees

her.

Across the river, a girl has appeared. Standing alone on the bank of the

river, her damp hair hangs to her shoulders and her wide eyes scan the

riverbank, as if she were looking for something. As he watches, she lifts her

arms towards the blue of the sky and seems to pull in the rays of sunshine on a

sparkling golden rope, wrapping them around herself and turning the air to

gold. The drops of water in her thin, yellow hair catch the sun and crown her in

daylight; for a split second, she is not a girl, but a queen—dripping in topaz and

shimmering with pearls. As her crown of liquid diamonds dissolves and falls to

the sharp grass, she shines even more brightly. Suddenly, there is a ringing in

the air, a tornado of light and colors and sounds, all singing with life and

tumbling against each other, with a single girl in pale yellow at the eye of the

storm.

The boy across the river who has just awoken from a sunlit slumber is

entranced by this girl who he has never seen before. She is something new and

golden and bright—and he finds that his eyes follow her as she does a graceful

ballet towards the edge of the riverbank and sits down to test the cool water

with her feet. As he watches her, he notices that she is not at the river alone,

9

but with two other friends. Her friends swim in the river, their hair damp and

tangled, and they beckon her to join them in the water.

A high, clear voice sings a word that sounds like music: “Isabelle!” the

voice calls, and the queen with no crown responds to her name, turning to look

at a girl with dark hair who urges her to come in the water. The girl in yellow

hesitates before she submerges herself in the cool river so that she can remove

four rings from her delicate fingers. She places them in the grass and then

splashes out to join her friends. For a second, she dives under the water,

dimming the light of the sun as she disappears from view. But then, when she

emerges from the flowing river, her blonde hair tosses drops of water in an arc

that seems to endlessly curve towards the blue of the sky, painting the air with a

rainbow prism of light.

Despite the number of people at the river, no one gives the girl with

yellow hair a second thought—no one but the boy across the river with the

water-stained book sees the gold that shines from her very being. As he

watches her dive under the water and laugh with her friends he feels like he is

on the other side of time, of space—in a world of colors and whiteness, falling

and floating, burning light and flickering darkness.

The boy with green eyes watches her and grins hesitantly. In that instant,

when his smile blooms across his face, she catches his eye. Slowly, reluctantly

10

she smiles too. It is a shy smile—full of self-consciousness and weary caution,

but she smiles nonetheless. It is this smile that gives him the absurd desire to

go to her—to swim with her and laugh with her and be near her as she

transforms the air into sunlight.

But he doesn’t go to her. He is not a boy who speaks loudly or dresses

himself up in shades of red. Instead, he makes his home in the spaces between

people—dwelling in the formless place that is reluctantly cleared to make room

for the ones who do not have shape that fits into the puzzle of a crowd.

Something old and sad lives in the chambers of his olive eyes—a dull hurt that

disappears when he allows himself to hope.

This hope glows like a star in his chest, growing brighter and brighter as

he imagines himself speaking to the gold girl. He thinks of her smile—how it

was shy and quiet and how wonderful it was that her smile was directed at him.

In a brilliant burst of euphoric courage—the likes of which he had never

experienced before—he makes the decision to go to her.

Driven forward by a compulsion that is both infinitely foreign and as

common as breathing, he stands up and takes the first step towards the girl in

yellow. There is a smile on his face and it is all that he can do to keep himself

from leaping absurdly across to the river to reach her. He knows that when he

goes to her, when he stands in her light, all will be right. When he comes to the

11

edge of the river, he sees that the current seems stronger today than it has

before, but this does not deter him. He uses a path made of smooth gray rocks

as stepping stones and makes it to the grassy riverbank, his heart beating wildly.

When he sees her, the boy with wanderlust has the sudden feeling that

he would never want to be anywhere else in the world but here—at this river in

this moment, completely at home in this great empty space with these crowded

rays of sunshine. As he walks closer and closer to the girl who is called Isabelle,

he stops just before he reaches her.

He sees her place four rings on her gentle fingers and he breathes a little

faster as she holds them up to the sunlight. They sparkle in the sun, with their

wrought silver bands and deep blue jewels. The rings glitter with silver and

shine with blue turquoise. Each one is shaped differently, catching the light in

different ways.

Suddenly, the glass hope that he holds within his chest shatters as the

realization about who she is dawns upon him. He had not seen her before

because she is not from his town or any town like it. She is from a world of

slinking evening gowns, liquid pearls dangling from earlobes and the soft,

whisper-sweet music of pianos played live in elegant restaurants—a world

where people wear silver rings with precious jewels when they swim in the

river.

12

Now the sun seems too hot and the air too thick; the light no longer falls

in brilliant, ordered rays, but in smoldering, chaotic beams of unwelcome heat.

He retreats into the shadows with the painful realization that she would never

view him as anything other than a boy with pitiful hope. When he hears her

laugh at something her friend said, he feels like she’s laughing at him and it only

makes him want to get away faster.

So he draws himself away from the girl with gold light, vowing never to

be drawn to glitter again.

***

Though he never goes back to the spot where he saw her, he stays at the

river until evening, watching the water from a small crag. He waits until the air

is still and then casts his eyes upon the river at night. Sunset stains the horizon

and the bright noontime sunlight that had been stolen from the sky now seems

to run in waves just below the surface of the water. It is a haunting beauty, not

the bright, sparkling glamour of the river during the day, but the river at night

gives the lovely, melancholy feeling of being truly alone in a place of rushing

stillness. The evening sky deepens and glows a dark violet color and the faintest

dusting of stars are strewn a million miles above the highest treetop. The night

breathes colors into the air and the water and transfigures the river into a place

of glittering blue moonlight and hot summer stars.

13

But the river at night holds no beauty for the boy who fell in love with

sunlight.

He never got close enough to see the blue of the gold girl’s eyes and the

softness of her white skin. He never heard her voice or listened to the rise and

fall of her words—words that spoke of her desire to travel the world, to read

books that leave her breathless, to meet the boy with the sad smile who she saw

once at a river on a warm summer day. The day in the sun will be pushed

further and further from their minds; they will never get the chance to tell each

other their stories and watch as two stories become one.

He is not a hero and she is not a heroine and they have no love story.

The girl whose world is black and white will never know the boy who once saw

colors that hummed in the very air around her. They will live their lives

separate and content. She will never whisper to him about her dreams and he

will never tell her, with sunset words and a voice like dew that, on one July day

when the air was alive with silver and gold, he wanted to lie beneath the sun

with her and watch as the brown of the trees bled into the blue of the sky and

the world deepened.

As the night wraps itself closer to the earth and the air grows heavy with

starlight, the river runs on. It pushes itself through the weighted darkness in

currents of rippling silver, carrying with it the music of living water and the dull

14

ghosts of old light. When it reaches the place where the black water transforms

into white foam, each drop does its fatal dance over the edge of a cliff,

cascading down into a dark pool.

Under a dim moon that only half-dreams its light into existence, the

river tumbles on until it runs into the ocean—that great, scary place where

there are no smooth currents and the sun unfailingly surrenders itself to the

night.

15

In Memoriam

16

When they first bought the house nearly fifty-years ago, Alice immediately

decided to transform what used to be the sitting room into a place for her

piano. She still had the same black Steinway, and though the notes sounded

weak and the keys had been sullied by years of well-meaning abuse from sticky-

fingered children, she still loved it just as much as the day her husband had

presented it to her as a gift. When she first saw it sitting there, its black lacquer

body shining and a white card resting on the keys that simply said “Love, Will”

in his careful, practiced hand, she drove an hour to his office to make sure that

the company had not made a mistake and delivered the instrument to the

wrong house. The young Will, with his unclouded green eyes and tanned skin,

laughed at her disbelief and insisted that he loved her more than she gave him

credit for. Alice, who had been taught that it was poor form to say that

something was too expensive, simply smiled and whispered her thanks, though

she cringed at the thought of what he had given up to buy her such a grand

gift.

Now, just as the instrument has slowly become less than it was, so has

Alice. Her hands, wrinkled and shaky, struggle across the keys. Some days, she

cannot bear to play because she’s afraid of what she will hear—afraid of the

power that the notes hold over her. Now, as she runs her fingers over the row

17

of perfectly spaced white and black, she is overcome by a melancholy that

weighs her down. There is a tune in her mind—something slow and slinking

that she used to know by heart. But she can’t remember the sounds of the

notes of the look of the music; it’s trapped in some faraway corner of her mind,

in an old practice room with boarded up windows and dusty floors. Alice rests

her elbows on the instrument in resignation and a discordant E-flat rings out—

echoing in the ghostly room.

At the very moment of her desperation, she sees a man’s shadow stretch

itself across the wooden floors. Will stands in the doorway—not the strong,

lovely Will of the past, but a man with light milky eyes and papery skin. When

he walks towards her, he limps slightly, as if a weight has been tied around his

right foot. “Alice,” he says, his voice rough from demanding orders to his

subordinates—first only a few and then many as he rose higher and higher in

his company. Before she knew it the bosses at the construction company were

handing him their keys on frayed corporation key chains and using words like

“ruthless” and “entrepreneurial“ to describe him while they toasted his

ambition with glasses of red wine. “I have something to tell you. Will you quit

playing that for a minute?”

Something cold rises up in her and she does not speak or look at him as

he moves closer to her. She does not look at him because she does not want to

18

see his eyes—cannot bear to see the pity that lives there or hear the apology

that will quiver on his lips as he breaks the news to her. For weeks she has been

avoiding him—escaping to the strip of sand and water that lines their backyard

or making excuses to go into town on the pretense that she needed more yarn

or sheet music. But now, as he stands in front of her, prepared to accost her

with the news that she already knows, she cannot meet his eyes.

A month ago, she had found the letter in the mail. When she saw that

gold manila envelope on the kitchen counter with a stamped address in the

corner, indicating that the sender was a man named Alan Tesserman from

Seaside Realty, her hands started shaking. She opened the little metal clasp and

saw that the envelope contained a contract with a pink post-it note stuck to the

document that said “Just sign and the deal is done. Congratulations!” Since

then, she has scarcely been able to look at her husband.

“I sold the house” he says, imbuing enough sympathy into his words to

make them sound kind—like a parent breaking grim but necessary news to a

child. “It’s too big for us—you know that. I can’t go outside anymore because

the weeds have grown too high and you can barely make it up the stairs.”

“Call James, tell him to help you clean the yard” she says, her voice

shaking.

19

He knows her too well to think that arguing will do him any good. “I

will,” he says, “he’ll be here tomorrow to help us get it ready for the new

owners. It’s done, Alice.”

Still staring down, she feels tears wet her eyelashes. Drop by drop, they

chase each other down her cheeks and gather on her lips. A few land on the

piano keys and linger there, slipping and quivering on the white surface—like

limpid drops of mercury.

She finally lifts her head and looks at him. He sees the redness on her

cheeks and the roads that lead away from her eyes—dewy trails that have cut

through the dryness of her papery skin. Though there is a part of him that

wants to comfort her, he feels a rise of annoyance swelling in him. She is overly

sentimental, he reasons—why should he have to listen to her make excuses for

her fear of change?

It wasn’t always like this. Before they had gotten married, they would stay

up together every night in the living room of their old apartment. She would

play for him until her fingers got tired, and then, just as the last note stretched

into silence, she would ask “Where do we go from here?” And every night he

would come up with a different scenario. Once, he said that, once they moved

out of their tiny studio by the ocean, he would buy her a house somewhere in

New England—where they could see the mountains all around them, but the

20

ocean would be nowhere in sight. He made up a story about the children they

would have (all girls, each with a different pair of colored snow boots that they

would wear throughout the entire winter) and the jobs that they would hold

(she would be a pianist and he would be an architect) and the exciting lives that

they would lead. She always laughed at his stories, but a part of him knew that

she wanted them to be true.

So when he saw that house, with its great, arching windows and cavernous

rooms he knew that she would love it. Something about it looked magical and

Alice believed firmly in magic. Sometimes, he would catch her staring out the

window and moving her lips as if in prayer. When he asked her what she was

doing, she would always say “Wishing on a star, of course!”

The first few years they lived in the house were some of the happiest of

their lives. Together, they emptied their few boxes of possessions into closets

and cabinets and spent night after night painting and stringing up curtains and

repairing anything that was broken. She had gotten a job writing for a

newspaper and she would come home each night with the tips of her fingers

covered in black ink. Soon, there were black fingerprints on the corners of

walls, on the white curtains, at the edges of the sink basin, and all over her

dresses. Try as hard as she might, the ink never came off with water and it

21

became a joke between the two of them that she had quite literally given the

house her own personal touch.

` On weekends they would go to the beach, first only the two of them and

then, once their children were born, it became a family tradition. Alice would

wear the same, flowing white dress that billowed around her knees and slipped

off her shoulders even while she was pregnant and in the picnic basket, Alice

never packed anything but pancakes. She insisted that nothing tasted better

after coming out of the salty water than sweet maple syrup and so, after a day

in the sun, she would drizzle syrup on the pancakes that had gone limp in the

salty air and swear that it was the best meal of her life. Eventually, Will and

their children accepted Alice’s odd culinary tastes and even started enjoying her

strange tradition of pancakes on the beach.

But underneath all their happiness about their new life, there were

moments when it all fell away. The night when Will’s mother called to say that

his sister had been hurt, that she was in a car accident and bleeding internally at

a hospital outside the city. He was shaking so hard that Alice had to drive,

though she didn’t have a license, for three hours across town. He sat in the

passenger’s seat with an expression as hard as stone and she drove with only

one hand so that she could grasp his as they sped down those empty, liquid

black roads.

22

But even then, it was always the two of them. Even when they fought—

even when Alice was in tears and Will sat stoically, pretending that he could not

hear her—they found a way to reconcile. On the walls of the great house, the

same house in which Will once saw a kind of magic, they etched out the story

of their lives.

Over time, though, they stopped going to the beach on weekends. Will

started having friends over from work on Saturday nights; together, they would

sit in the dining room, laughing more loudly as the hands of the clock drew

closer to midnight. When she joined them one day, Alice swore she did not

mind that Will had spilled red wine on her white sundress; but the next day,

that dress—still warm with the sun from a hundred weekends at the ocean—

was tossed into a bin filled with old milk containers and browning orange peels.

Once, when Alice was playing the piano, Will insisted that he would buy her a

new one—the sound was deteriorating and the piano itself was a rickety old

instrument, he said. Will even suggested that he would have someone pick up

the piano and take it away, so that they could go into the city and find one that

played right. He didn’t understand when Alice stormily refused his offer before

falling into a hurt silence. He also didn’t understand why she still sat in front of

the window every night, looking up at an empty sky; the new city that was

being built a few miles away from their house (with buildings that Will’s

23

company constructed) lit up the night sky with neon—winning the battle with

starlight. And Alice—ever-hopeful, ever-hurt—wondered when it was that Will

had stopped believing in beautiful stories.

Now, as they stand in front of each other, Alice sees an ending in Will’s

eyes. Though she wants to protest, to tell him that it doesn’t have to end

now—that they can hang on a bit longer, live in this house for a bit longer, her

words falter and die on her lips.

A gust of wind blows through the room and carries with it a piece of

sheet music that had been sitting on the piano. The paper loops through the

air, flapping and lurching with the breeze—like a hand waving goodbye.

                       

24

                       

Chess                                                

   

25

In our house at the end of the road, the wooden chess pieces that sat an old

checkerboard were continually being arranged and rearranged.

As I fingered a piece that looked like a horse, I noticed how rough it felt

between my fingers. I didn’t know exactly how old the set was, but the little

identical pieces that made up the front row on each side had all been worn

down so much that their paint was matted and chipping away in some places.

The only pieces that still had bits of varnish on them were the two kings. My

father, who sat across from me, carefully explained that the little, worn pieces

were called pawns. “There are more pawns than any other piece,” he said.

“Every other chess piece has a twin, except for the king and the queen.”

He then proceeded to explain the rules, one after another. As he spoke,

his voice never rose above a steady, speaking tone—even as he raised his pitch

ever-so-slightly in frustration when he tried to direct my attention back to the

board. I had seen him play the game before—brows furrowed, two elbows

planted firmly at the edges of the board before him, fingers knotted in front of

his face to cover his clenched jaw, never lessening his focus even when he was

just playing against my older brother. So when he decided that I, having just

played my last round of elementary school hop-scotch, should be introduced to

the game that consumed all his time, I had no choice but to sit inside with the

single, colorful promise that a round well-played meant that I would get to go

to the summer carnival being held on the pier.

26

I didn’t quite understand what he saw in those little pieces that skipped

across a splintering board with flaking black paint—but I listened to his

instructions and asked questions to demonstrate my interest when the silences

between his explanations seemed to grow too long. The only thing that really

captivated me was the names of the pieces. A knight conjured up brilliant

scenes of young men clad in polished metal armor, bearing swords that made

the sound of silver as they were drawn from their sheaths; a bishop brought to

mind the scent of burning candles and dizzyingly potent images of stained-glass

windows that sent light dancing through the halls of a haunted sanctuary; and

the king and queen, of course, were the crown jewels—the lovely pair that was

shielded, for they carried the weight of a country on their shoulders.

My father, who had finished explaining the rules of the game, turned the

board around so that the dull, black pieces were in front of me. “Black moves

first,” he said, “make your move.”

I complied and moved a pawn straight forward two spaces (just like he

said that I could on the first move). He, too, moved a pawn and after he went,

I tried to mirror his moves the best that I could. After he had moved another

pawn, and then a knight, and then a bishop, and then countless other pieces, I

reached out in the hopes of moving my bishop.

“Lucy,” he said disapprovingly,“You don’t want to do that.” And then he

proceeded to explain that he was in a perfect spot to take my king (which I had

27

stupidly let get blocked in) and that the only spot that I could move it would

still be directly in his bishop’s line of attack.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Well, you have to put a lesser piece in the way, so that I can’t take your

king,”he said. “You should sacrifice a pawn.”

My eyes briefly scanned the assortment of black pawns that were scattered

on the board. I counted them: five pawns still left. Three sat helplessly off the

board next to a bishop, rooke, and two knights—my father’s spoils. As much

as I wanted to win the game, or at least prove to my father that I could play a

decent first round, I couldn’t fathom deliberately letting him take a piece of

mine.

“Can I do anything else?”

“No. You have to put your pawn in the way, or I’ll take your king, which

would mean that I would win.”

Cringing, I reluctantly pushed a wooden pawn with a star-shaped space

where the paint had chipped off to the next spot on the board. My father, as I

knew he would, promptly added the small, black piece to his ever-growing

collection. I knew that he was deliberately going easy on me—and that my

small pile of white pieces were concessions that he made to make me feel

better—but that still didn’t stop him from making sure that he was challenging

me. Fewer than a dozen moves later, my father uttered the words that assured

28

the end of the game: “Check-mate,” he said softly, offering a smile as a means

of apology.

And, indeed, the game was over. My king was trapped—and I was free.

“You can walk to the pier now,” my dad said, “I’m sure your brother will

be at the carnival, you can ask him to bring you home.”

“Thanks!” I said, getting up from my seat at the small table where we kept

the chess board.

I dashed to the mudroom and pulled on my old sneakers with fraying

laces. Quickly slinging my backpack on my shoulders and slipping an extra key

into the front pocket, I turned the knob on the front door and was about to

step outside when I had a wild thought.

Not knowing exactly what I was doing, I slowly walked back into the

room with the chess set. My father had left the same time that I did—probably

to go to his study—and the set sat exactly as we had left it. I looked at the pile

of black pieces that he had taken from me. There, I saw the pawn that I had

willingly given up—the one with the star-shaped space. Without really knowing

why, I slipped the piece into the pocket of my jeans and walked out the front

door.

***

29

The carnival was situated so close to the ocean that the salt air was

beginning to rust the metal of the tent poles. Great, mountainous tents were

clustered together and colorful rides that boasted names like “The Fire-Starter”

and “The Wrath of the Waves” lined the edges of what used to be an empty

field and stretched onto the pier. I had gone to the summer fair before, and I

knew that its opening day—which was today—was always the best. The other

girls from my school were somewhere in the endless mass of people who

flooded to the normally sleepy oceanfront town for the carnival—but I didn’t

want to spend my time with them. There was something brilliantly, heart-

racingly exciting about being alone at a place like this. Today, I wanted to be

alone so that I could see the throng of people who I had never seen before. I

wanted to take notice of the roller coaster attendant’s curling beard, I wanted to

read the words “Williamstown Baseball” on the shirt of the teenaged boy who

carried blue cotton candy, I wanted to sit in the food tent with a sugary drink

and an impossible-to-eat caramel apple and watch the fair. It felt grown up,

somehow—watching. And I was proud of myself for wanting to be alone, so

that I could have the luxury of observing.

I was doing exactly what I said I would—that is, sitting in a tent and

eating sticky carnival food. Well, it wasn’t a tent precisely—more like a large,

30

tearing red tarp help up by four metal poles and situated near the food booths.

I inhaled the smell of hot dogs mingled with the subtle scent of oil seeping

from the mechanical rides and thought idly that all carnivals must have the

same smell, except this carnival in particular also had the impenetrable smell of

sea-air hanging over everything. From where I sat I could see the Ferris wheel

looping endlessly around a lighted axis and hear the bass from the music

coming from the games tent that made the wooden planks of the pier quiver. I

wondered idly if, from the top of the Ferris wheel, you could make out the

faces of the people below you—or if everyone on the ground seemed as tiny

and faceless as chess pieces.

Just as I was wondering this, I noticed that large groups of people were

migrating to the far side of the fair. On a whim, I quickly finished the last bits

of my caramel apple and followed the colorful mass of fair-goers. Their

destination, it seemed, was a large, purple and yellow striped marquee tent. On

the side of the tent, there was a fading white sign that read “Step inside to see

the Castlebury Circus Company! Over a dozen acts to amaze and astound you!”

Intrigued, I stood in line to gain entrance. When I got to the door, a man

with a straight black beard so long that is was tied with a red ribbon held a

metal bucket out to me. “Five dollars” he said. I slung my backpack over my

shoulder so that I could open the pockets to take out my wallet. I kept my

31

money in a duct tape wallet decorated with magic markers that I had made in

class. I felt his impatient eyes on me as he watched me fumble for the money.

Slightly embarrassed of my childish accessory, I quickly handed him a five

dollar bill and entered the tent with my head down.

Once inside, I was immediately struck by size of the tent. Everything on

the inside was purple and yellow, colored by the light of the sun shining

through the tent’s stripes. At the tent’s center, there was a round stage

decorated with a painted-on five-pointed star. The seats set up around the stage

were quickly filling up with wise-eyes circus goers clutching towering cones of

cotton-candy and oversized stuffed animals. I quickly found a seat near the

entrance and sat down.

The show began with wild, instrumental music that provided the

soundtrack for two performers on unicycles. The performers, one man and one

woman, were dressed in identical rainbow-colored body suits. They came out

holding hands and performed a graceful, fluid dance on their one-wheeled

machines. They looped around each other, tying and untying knots that they

had created with their bodies. Finally, they joined their hands together and

lifted them in unison above their heads to create a makeshift archway. Through

the archway, a man in a glittering purple tailcoat and black top hat stepped into

the spotlight.

32

“Welcome!” he said, his voice vibrating in the speakers that were placed

all around the tent. “Tonight, you will see things you have never seen before.

Tonight, you will watch, amazed and unbelieving, as the brilliant men and

women of the Castlebury Circus Company dazzle you with the acts that we

have prepared. However, I discourage this dubious attitude. In order to enjoy

our show you must believe, because every single moment of our show is real.

There are no illusions—everything, including the danger—is the truth.” At his

words, the audience erupted into cheers. The ringleader flashed a pointed-tooth

smile at the people gathered and then stepped into the shadows as a young,

wild-haired man led a lion out on a leash. The act with the lion was quickly

followed by an act that involved two men and two women.

The men stepped out first, balancing opposite ends of a long, thin metal

pole that stretched the diameter of the circular stage on their shoulders. They

stopped so that the pole passed directly through the center of the stage, facing

each other and acting as human supports for the beam between them. Quickly,

the two women danced out to join them and the men hoisted the female

acrobats onto the now flimsy-looking pole. The women cartwheeled and

flipped, doing a careful, practiced dance from their perch in the air. But then,

one acrobat—a woman with thin blonde hair and a crooked nose—fell from

the air and onto the ground.

33

As she hit the ground, her leg bent under itself, like the broken wing of a

fallen sparrow.

Though she hadn’t fallen far, I could see the sheen of sweat on her

forehead, the growing whiteness of her bottom lip as her teeth cut into it. Her

partner did not cease her routine for a moment, but the audience seemed far

more interested in the woman on the floor than the other acrobat, who, free to

use the whole beam, was leaping high into the air and contorting herself to

capture the attention of the distracted faces. The announcer in the purple

tailcoat was no where to be seen, but, from his place in the shadows, his voice

boomed out: “See, folks. I wasn’t lying. The danger is real.”

I didn’t know what else to do, so I just sat there—in that bright, colorful

tent—waiting for the act to end, the weight of the pawn heavy in my back

pocket.

34

The Rapture of The Deep

35

In those days, I thought I had the whole world ahead of me. I imagined

the rest of my life unfolding before me—becoming more brilliant, more

beautiful with every year. And in some ways it did. When we drove to Searidge

at the beginning of the summer, with two moving trucks tailing our little silver

car, I couldn’t have been happier. I still remember riding in the car with my

father as he listened intently to the GPS. Every time the low, robotic voice

would list a direction he would repeat it to himself. “Turn left in two point five

miles” it would drone and he would whisper “Left. Okay. Left in two point five

miles. Two point five.” Our radio was broken, so I entertained myself by

opening the window and letting the wind blow through my hair.

On the floor of my father’s car, I noticed a damp, browning maple leaf

from our old house. Wet with rainwater from this morning when we departed,

the leaf went limp in my hand when I unbuckled my seatbelt and picked it up

off the car mat. It looked just like the hundred other leaves that blew into the

dining room when I opened the front door, or got stuck to the bottom of the

black heels that my mother bought me for my first school dance, or lined the

floor of Henry’s tree house. I swear, when I found it there—that perfect,

simple symbol, the last years of my life summed up in one frail object—I was

convinced that it was some kind of sign. So I ceremoniously ripped it into four

little pieces (one for each member of my family) and held the torn remnants of

36

my old house and my old life out the window for the wind to carry away. It was

time for something new, I reasoned, something wonderful.

As we drew nearer to the ocean, I watched that great expanse rise up to

greet us. The air smelled like summer—that salty, grassy scent that made me

want to take deep breaths. If I squinted my eyes into the evening light, I could

almost see the place where the black road melted into the horizon. And, at

exactly the place where the road ended, I saw the lighthouse. With each day

that I lived there, in that summer and the years to follow, I began to identify

more and more with that lighthouse, even if the redone lighthouse-keepers

home that we moved into never really felt like mine. Sometime decades ago,

the light went out and never shone again, but no one had ever bothered to fix

it. In those odd moments when I felt nostalgic for a past that didn’t belong to

me, I would sit there in that vast, glass-windowed room at the very top and

imagine that the dust motes that drifted through the air were filaments of light

that were emitted from the heated bulb in the middle of the room. There was

something impossibly romantic about imagining ships emerging from the inky

sea and all the people that they carried—lovers and heroes and tragic,

homebound men with kind eyes and rough beards who watched the land grow

closer through rusting looking-glasses.

It took us weeks to move in. The sitting room of the house was the

common area to which plastic containers and cardboard boxes were opened,

37

unpacked, disassembled, and endlessly siphoned in and out. I set up my room

(at the very top of the house, with a perfect view of the lighthouse) exactly like

my room in the country, with all my books piled neatly and the glass figures

that my grandmother had given me all lined up on my dresser. She had passed

away the summer after I turned twelve, but I didn’t cry about her death until I

was much older. Back then, even though I was well into my teenaged years

when we first moved to the lighthouse, I didn’t think that there was anything

sad about deat8h. I thought of myself as so selfless that I could deal with the

pain of not being able to speak to my grandmother, as long as she was happy.

And I firmly believed that she was deliriously, impossibly happy wherever she

was. Only later did I think about what it really meant to die. Now when I think

about my grandmother, I picture myself in one of those questioning rooms in

police departments that you see in movies. The ones with the window that the

people inside the room can’t see out of, but everyone outside the room uses to

look directly into the space where the criminal is being interrogated. I don’t

know if she is happy now, I didn’t even know if she was happy when she was

alive. I just hope that she can see me.

I have memories of that summer, but only a few stick out in my mind.

Most of them are just bits of color, points of light in my peripheral vision.

Occasionally I’ll remember something specific, like how once, when I was

walking home, a silver charm shaped like a sun fell off the bracelet that my

38

mother had given me and into the gutter. I sat there for three hours, using long

sticks and bits of dirty string that I had found on the side of the road to try to

retrieve it. I can also remember other things, like making friends with girls who

wore their hair long and insisted on calling me by my full name—never any of

the nicknames that I assured them I preferred. “Is-a-belle!” they would call, like

my teachers back in the country, even as they addressed each other by

shortened, uncomplicated pet names. I also remember other things, like a rock

in our back yard that held the heat of the sun even as the evening drew itself

over everything—and a day that I spent outside the town, at a river with water

that felt like cool sunlight.

But I remember one moment in particular with unparalleled clarity. It

was at the end of summer, and by that time I had already established a routine

for myself. I had gotten a job selling little glass bottles that had pieces of paper

for people who were taking boats out to sea. Tourists bought them so that they

could write a note and toss it overboard—their very own message in a bottle. I

found this idea, though somewhat cheesy, incredibly appealing. Every day, I

watched as thoughts and desires were freed and swept away by the sea. In my

mind, I imagined a record of the hopes and feelings and messages of the world

existing at the bottom of the sea—each thought encased glass, preserved

forever in the current of the waves.

39

Every evening, after the last sliver of orange sun disappeared under the

horizon line, I would pack the little blue-green bottles and small scrolls into

cushioned boxes and lock them away in a little silver briefcase. At the end of

my shift, I watched as the town slowly withdrew and became silent. The only

people left were usually the few stragglers—tourists who had missed their bus

to the city, teenagers traipsing across the boardwalk and into the night, men

trailing wisps of cigar smoke who came out to the water to smoke or think or

do both at once—but that night there was no one there except for a man in

dirty breeches with a yellow windbreaker fastened under his chin. When he

entered the pool of light created by the streetlamps, I saw the lines on his face

and the creases branching out from the corner of his eyes. When he saw me, a

girl in the shadows clutching a green glass bottle, he walked over and asked me,

in a voice that was so quiet it sounded like a whisper, what I was selling.

And so I told him about the messages in a bottle. I told him how people

bought them so that they could give a piece of themselves to the sea and how I

was sorry if it sounded cheesy and how I’ve only wrote one message but that I

loved the idea. And he stood there listening. As I spoke, the other merchants

slowly packed their things and abandoned their tables. When I was done, the

man with the lines on his face asked tipped his head into the light and asked

me, “What did you give to the sea?”

40

I looked at him, with his brown skin and sea-glass eyes and tattered

windbreaker and I thought for a moment that he looked like the sailors who I

imagined being beckoned into the harbor by my lighthouse—back when it still

held light. And because it was evening and because everything was empty and

because I sort of was too, I told him about my message. I told him about my

grandmother and how I missed her light and how I missed the little brown burs

that stuck to my shirt when I used to play in her garden and how I missed the

person who she made me become. I also told him, so quickly and breathlessly

that I’m not even sure he understood my words, about how I was terrified for

the rest of my life to start and how I cried when I lost the sun charm that my

mother gave me and I ripped the maple leaf to mark the loss of my old life

because I was afraid that if I didn’t attach meaning to the charm and the leaf

and about a thousand other things in my life then they would have no meaning

at all. And so I stood there, telling my story to a man who I only trusted

because I thought the wrinkles on his face made him look kind.

After I had finished I remember a silence that stretched itself out to the

horizon and a feeling that reminded me of the sun. I watched him draw a pen

out of his coat with shaking hands. When he held it out to me, I grasped the

cold object between my fingers and looked up at him, confused. “Will you

write something for me?” he asked.

41

He raised his hands, slowly, to me. I saw the callouses on his palms and

the freckles on his wrist and the unsteady, jerking movements that his quivering

hands made. And then I understood.

I drew out a paper and drew the pen across the paper in the shape of the

words that he spoke—the words that he wanted to live on the bottom of the

sea.

Alice—

Do you remember the time when you said that you were afraid to go snorkeling

because you were afraid that you wouldn’t want to come up for air? You told me, all those

days ago, that you had never seen anything more beautiful than the dawn light at the bottom

of the ocean. I never quite understood what you meant—just like I never understood a

thousand different things about you—but I read, in one of your old books, that the feeling of

not wanting to come up from the bottom of the sea is called the rapture of the deep. The book

gave some scientific explanation for it, but I know that you lost yourself down there because

you were one of the few people in the world who had the gift of giving yourself up to something

greater. Well, now I’ve lost you and the world is a lot less spectacular from where I am. But

now I’m giving this—giving you—to the ocean.

I just hope that you can see me. Can you do that for me, Alice? Just look after me before I

step out of time and into your arms.

Goodbye.

42

And there, in that moment that became greater and more incredible even

as it faded out of existence, I felt the pulse of the world vibrating in the sea-

soaked air. I don’t remember how the note got into the bottle or who put the

cork in. All I remember is seeing the man walk to the edge of the ocean and

watching the bottle fall into the waves. And under that great abyss that pulsed

and spun and beat wildly to the rhythm of humanity, the old man walked off

towards the ghostly town—his dark silhouette growing translucent against the

sky and, before I knew it, he too was swallowed by the haze of the earth.