BLUE AIR

A Woman Who Wants to Fish

12 B lue A ir A Woman Who Wants to Fish Elissa May kneels in church, lights candles, prays to a fictitious God for a voyage. Do you decline, old man? she asks God, the challenge of opening some window, I give you until tomorrow, are you ready, old man? Excuse me, I must go. It’s bizarre how my mother insists I come here. It’s more peculiar how I give in, she thinks, watching her woman figure in shop windows. It looks inhuman as if it were a mirage. She wants to catch a big fish, cook it on the sand. Maybe, I should wear a mask, but what sort of mask would it be? She goes to bed to drown in sheets, comes up for air. She has her own room, but she cannot breathe. She tries to live like a hermit, but her mother knocks in the morning to offer bacon. You know my daughter, the mother says, when introducing Elissa. She shrugs because her daughter has a few gray hairs in her twenty-five year old uncut locks. Elissa thinks about juggling and acrobatics. But naturally, the sea pulls the hardest. She wants to fish. Marry, her mother tells her, a word, like water, pushing her toward a narrow dry chute. She pulls guilt like taffy with her mother who baked yellow cakes with lavender frosting for her eleventh birthday. 13 K ate G ale She sleeps lightly, watches the sun rise early and set late. It tries to pull her over the hill, Good luck, it cries. She smells dates, smells their foreignness like the body she lives in with its female odors. She feels desire stirring. At five she wanted to join the circus, tame lions, ride elephants. She wanted to be a tiger dreaming tiger dreams. Her mother knocks. We only have eggs, she says. When you were a baby, she tells Elissa, I felt your sharp teeth. Elissa dreams night and day, but her mother needs her until a man comes to bring grandchildren, an update to their very old play, a new scene to the terrifying sameness. The mother recalls waiting on her wedding night disguised as wanting, playing out in her head a private sexual scene, she flew above her wedding bed in a slow plane. From up there, it looked ridiculous. Something very important is happening, she told herself. That night Elissa was conceived. Elissa lies in her bed at night waiting for a man or her mother to die. And one comes. He marries the mother, who at sixty-five, dyes her grey hair red and leaves with him. Elissa inherits the house. You can stay here or go fishing, her mother says, it doesn’t matter. ...