Felicity Landa
I am at the beach when your Find my iPhone stops its share. You’d made fun of me for always checking your route from work to home, lying on my back beside the fraying, yellow tummy time mat. You don’t understand eternity the way I do, that moments of time stretch and then compress, like a sharpie sketch on a flaccid balloon.
I am at the beach when that last tether between us is severed by the infinite void. Get off your phone, mommy, Liam says to me, and his curly hair looks so much like yours that for a moment I want to scream. He is holding two halves of a mussel shell. I see the paella you ordered on our honeymoon in Sevilla, I see you scooping the tender flesh from the black shell with your tongue the way you would later between my thighs.
Liam is filling the empty shell with sand and I remind myself that I am jaded, and he is five. There is no metaphor here. You just didn’t love me.
Liam rushes down the bank and into a clump of seagulls. They burst up the beach, their wings slice the sunlight above me. I am breathless for a moment while I fall backward in time, the birds that we hung together in his baby blue room spun our moments into memories on their paper backs. You fucked me with my swollen belly pressed to the window because I said I didn’t want to look at the crib.
I am at the beach and our son is sailing his hands through the air like boats in the ocean sky. To him you are gone the way his hand disappears from view when it travels too close to the sun. To me, you are Rob Stopped Sharing His Location.
Is it the salt water flecks in the air that forever remind me of the way your mouth tasted when you would sweat? I tasted them the day we stood on the pier carousel, our son on a dead-eyed plastic horse between us, and you said you couldn’t do this anymore. You had chocolate fingerprints on your shirt from where Liam had dragged the fabric down to the earth. He’d been writhing and arching his back on the ground between us, face twisted and red as if he were in terrible pain. He was screaming about wanting more ice cream.
Clara did you hear me, you said.
I can’t do this anymore either, I said. But we don’t exactly have a choice.
The truth is a thing that I will never admit, it is delicate and dead, like a flightless paper bird. The truth is that choice is for selfish people who sleep naked in a sunlit room in Spain, tracing their future on each other’s bellies like there is nothing in the world but time.
The truth is you left before I could.
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Felicity Landa is a Chicana writer with an MFA from UC Riverside Palm Desert. Her work has appeared in Raising Mothers, The Sunlight Press, Capulet Mag, and elsewhere. As a screenwriter she writes freelance for the production company Voyage Media, and placed as a semifinalist in the 2021 Austin Film Festival script competition. She was a 2022 Mentee for the Latinx in Publishing mentorship program, and has served as an editor for Literary Mama and The Coachella Review. You can read more of her work at felicitylanda.com