Sarah Perrin
There’s foam at the end of the ocean, slimy suds that crawl over her toes like curdled milk. It’s January, but still she’s letting the water lap at her feet and ankles, letting it drench the frayed ends of her light blue jeans, letting it stain them a darker color, almost black, which her mother had asked her to wear anyhow. A piece of what was once a vase, a bottle of white wine, a Heineken is half-buried beside her pinky toe. She plucks it out, a misshapen rectangle that fits into her palm, Kelly green glass that’s been frosted by the tides, sanded down after multiple violent decades. She wonders if she too was drowned for thirty years, would she emerge a child version of herself? Softer, immune to light.
She pushes her thumb into the glass, looking for a sharp edge. There’s only one, what was maybe the lip, the place where, sitting with feet covered by a child’s lumpy sandcastle, someone sucked down a cool drink to fend off the August heat. It could have been his, she thinks, recalling how after a day in the sun he would stand up, knees cracking, and sling the sagging beach chair across his shoulder, twist his baseball cap around, his thick hands gathering up her child-sized shovels and buckets and hoes and sifters. With her mother, he’d head home on a path blanketed in footprints, leaving behind a graveyard of empty beers, light lagers that circled her castle like a moat. As she followed in his wake, hurrying on little legs, she’d snatch up each bottle, going on about how careless he was with their planet. But he disagreed. With all the efforts to clean up the beach, who else, he said, would ensure the survival of sea glass?
She puts the glass in her mouth now—salt dissolving on her tongue, kernels of sand catching in the back of her throat. Of course, she knows it wasn’t his. There hadn’t been enough time; he’d been too young. She lets the one rough corner dig into her cheek until she can taste metal.
Through the wind, a sound emerges, a voice that muscles from dune to shore. Someone is calling her name, asking her to return. They’d like to begin, to start distributing him among the waves, release his cremains to the water, calcium phosphate that will, she read, sink almost immediately. But the ash won’t dissolve, not fully. He’ll become a part of the ocean, one piece in its mineral makeup.
They yell to her once more, and she takes the glass out of her mouth. She tongues the cut she’s made—plugging the trickle of blood, digging out the burning salt—and considers that this fragment isn’t nearly smooth enough, that it isn’t done. Closing a hand around it, she reaches her fist back and launches the glass forward, into the sea. The water bursts on impact, bubbles in acceptance, then stills. They say her name a third time. She turns and heads toward the procession, the only prints in the sand her own.
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Sarah Perrin is an MFA candidate in creative writing at New York University. She is also the fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Previously, she was an assistant editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Her work is forthcoming in Passages North and has been supported by Community of Writers. She lives in New York City.