Mollie McLean
I gave my baby away and God gave me a Walkman. A year before she was born all I wanted was a band, a boyfriend, a day at the beach. She came to be at the beach. All things are possible in a few seconds of grave mistakes. Six weeks later my world spilled into the ocean’s brine like a tipped cup at the edge of a table. There was no boyfriend. No decision was made. This was a decision. Once she was gone, there were only the bands, and the beach. My mother and sister placed the headphones on my ears and parked my empty body on a lounge chair under the sun; tears are undetectable beneath a veil of sweat. The UV index was inadequate. It couldn’t burn away a gulf of sorrow. Normal compressed into nothingness. I listened to mixtapes, the ones I made once I dropped out of school to wait for my daughter’s arrival. My sister felt bad and let me use the records she’d brought back from college, British post-punk power pop in which I found a tribe, girls with stories like mine, only so much more romantic with a downbeat and a different vernacular—goodbye girl, you’re up the junction. The songs comprised a life raft and I clung to it with torn fingernails, my nose barely above the swells as the surf slapped the shore. The air smelled of salt, of decay, of things given back to the water. A seagull’s shriek pierced the sky; I lay there burning and longed for England. In England the water is cold. The sky is gray, like my heart full of nails—my heart, another God-given machine. I tugged the headphones off; my feet found the sand, and then the water. I dove below a bathwater warm wave, surfaced, then flipped onto my back. My empty body floated, aching to give safe harbor; my heart beating in time, an echo, sounding for my child.
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Mollie McLean retired from a commercial kitchen in the Texas Hill Country in 2019 and now lives in Austin with her boyfriend and a ridiculous number of rescue cats. Her work has appeared in Meat for Tea and two of Pamela Des Barres’ books on writing memoir. She is on Twitter as @pennypriddy and if you know where she got her handle she’ll buy you a coke.