Spindrift

1. Flood

I was lost at sea by the snack table, swallowing morsels of vegan carrot cake like sand. The host had pulled out his service weapon to show to the other party guests, just as Alex sailed through the storm door. I waved, buoyant at her entrance, then heard my words spill out after I said them. Do you remember anything?

She huffed her low laugh. I was going to ask you that.

The host began telling a war story, pointing at his collectible knives with glassy eyes. Months had passed since Alex and I had seen each other. I floated close to her flannelled arm, puzzling out how to talk about that night, when something had washed our memories of it away.

________

The seaside bar hung over the ocean, leaning on rotting beams driven down into wet sand.

Patrons poured in to see bands on the weekends, rolling out from a rivulet of parallel-parked cars winding all the way down to the water. Inside they knocked back cocktails in plastic cups and sucked chicken wings off the bone.

But the bar had its tricks, feigning solidity where there was little. The open planks of the front steps caught your feet, an informal sobriety test on the way in and out. Handmade curtains for bathroom stalls brushed your shins as you pissed. Stools shifted suddenly under your butt from one leg shorn too short.

The back deck floated somewhere between sea and sky, trembling in heavy wind, a great ship on a journey that went nowhere at all. I'd stood on those boards and felt them creak beneath my feet, their precariousness a shivery danger, like cresting a rollercoaster with loosening bolts. The bar was already filling that night when my partner and I dropped our belongings on a table among his colleagues. I was a guest there, or a witness, listening to their happy chattering like dolphin clicks. Alex worked with my partner, and if I had seen her around only occasionally, I liked her. Slouchy cargo pants and messy blonde bun bouncing atop her head, she wove in and out of the crowd, bodies moving aside for her like swaying kelp.

I sipped two mixed drinks over a few hours, leaning against my partner's arm and breathing the odd alchemy of brine and beer. I sat, observing, a mudskipper perched on an unbalanced stool. The house lights went down, then flared up cobalt blue, like diving into a fish tank. A garage band tuned guitars, then thumped a bass line that overtook the beat of my heart. I began to feel part of the flow instead of beside it.

Alex swirled with a dimpled grin, a betta fish refracting light as she danced. On a pass past the table, she caught my arm and drew me into the current. We whirled, the same Converse sneakers pounding on the wood floor, a similarity that felt serendipitous. We played like freshwater creatures, safe and euphoric.

When she grimaced at the tall Narragansett beer in her hand, she yelled in my ear, I don't want this! You finish it off!

I giggled and shoved her away. She had left half of the cheap swill sweating in my grip, and I opened my mouth to its bitterness.

When I spun I saw my partner's face in the blue light, smiling at my unrestrained joy. Then I sat straight up in bed.

________

The skip from standing up to waking up was violent, a tearing of continuity. A single flicker of memory through gauze: pavement and the bottom of a car door. Black pebbled tar and my gray Converse drooping on old tread-marks. I heard my own voice, a half-lost phrase. That was all.

________

My partner woke beside me and placed a hand to my back while I hyperventilated, confused. He whispered words to soothe my displacement, the wrongness of finding myself in the wrong place and time.

I had been dancing, and then I was in bed. Vertical, then horizontal. Shoeless and re-clothed, in an instant.

He built a seawall against the tsunami of...