Kat F. Ellison

fiction

Feb 1

Written By Anne Anthony

Underneath the Surface Tension

Time ticks on but I can’t hear it when I dunk below the water

The world is blurred and chilled underneath

Bones don’t crack

Muscles don’t throb

I am suspended in every dimension

But my lungs search and fill and contract and flood the inside of me with desperation until I pull my nose and lips above the water, breaking the calm above me

Dad stands at the edge of the dirty pond

Arms hover and feet almost dip in, like he might join me,

Like he was thinking I might not come back up

Every inch of him covered by his royal blue sweatsuit, the hood up and strings pulled close to his face

Every inch of him sprayed with nearly toxic bug spray that makes me cough

And when I break out of the water he slugs me inside a towel

We don’t go outside without protection

Lily pads surround the circumference of the pond, green and black frogs blend and slide in and out

Dark water, serene without me

Humid air, perspiring, buzzing and humming with all the unseen things

Sometimes it feels safer to drown

There are eight million things that can kill you

I count them before I fall asleep instead of sheep

Dad kisses me on the top of the head and even though I’m too old I let him because that’s all he has to kiss anymore,

I could never have imagined how quiet the house would be without her

Dad mumbles I love you, then clears his throat and says it louder, with distinction and purpose, because he wants me to believe him, and I do

I try not to hate him

I don’t really hate him

But he doesn’t know how to be himself and her, they were not blended like the frogs in the pond water, they were perfect and separate,

I try not to hate him

But I’m sixteen and it’s easy to hate things

In the morning I make his coffee and pour in too much milk because that’s how Mom would do it and I like to think he hates me (back) for that but I have no proof because he just smiles and slurps from his mug and she used to remind him how ugly that sound was but I can’t do it I can’t do it so I just listen to the slurping and then grab my backpack and run.

The high school, on its dry hillside, is quieter than it used to be, than it should be

First it was all the rain, the mud, the flooding, the kids who lost their old brown teddy bears in their underwater seaweeded homes

The kids who lost their dogs and cats and guinea pigs,

Who started walking to school because their cars floated down the new rivers,

Who used to sit and smoke on their childhood swing sets,

Now there are no house pets, the smell of bloated, wet, and dead are too fresh in our minds,

Now no one drives, even if the cars were here we wouldn’t,

Now the childhood swing sets are just dangling chains

We own a house almost to the top of a winding mountain road (so yes, I walk to school uphill both ways) and didn’t fear the rising, flowing river so much

But Jetta did

And Sophie did

And Rabbit did

And Frank did

And Tyler did

And Lucky did

And Chester did (we didn’t make fun of his name so much after his house collapsed)

The water consumed the high school hallways without ever making it through the giant, swinging doors

Our bones crack

Our muscles throb

We walk to Biology and Environmental Science class dragging sledgehammers of memory behind us

We now hate Biology and Environmental Science but everyone, everyone presses upon the importance of science like it’s the only thing left that matters

Lucky plugs their ears during Environmental Science with cotton balls and Mr. Shapiro says nothing

Chester read comic books during every class before, does still, and always will

Tyler and Rabbit play some shit game on their phones during Biology, yell out and swear during lectures, and Mrs. Bello says nothing

Now Mom’s dead and I listen to all the lectures and take notes and raise my hand because anything is better than remembering

I’m a better student now than ever

Joking and snorting with friends tends to the past like trying to squash all the disease-ridden bugs with tissue paper

We are living in a jungle now. Stories upon stories of plants have begun to swell and tower above us and we’re expecting crocodiles to inhabit the rivers any day now. Giant, beautiful, rainbowed, and also miniscule angry insects buzz around and kill us so everyone carries a swatter tucked into their tucked-in sweatsuits with the perspiring air rising above us and we, no longer remembering the world as it was, no coldness or ice, no summer nights at the fair, no fireworks or parades or baking in the sun in beach sand. Just this – hellish, sweating place we call home now

I’m going to build a time machine, Rabbit tells us at lunch

He’s the hottest boy in the sophomore class

His jaw bones could cut glass

Our temperatures elevate while staring at him

Tyler barks, a time machine, what are you, twelve?

Rabbit shakes his head so fast we can barely see it, I’ve got it all figured, it’s gonna work, I’ll go back and fix everything

Fix what? Tyler spits

He spits

And I imagine it fizzling away like bacon grease

Fix, you know, the world, so it’ll be better than this

We love Rabbit for thinking this way,

Me and Jetta and Sophie and Frank

Chester doesn’t sit with us anymore

Prefers the safety and company of his waterlogged comic books

Jetta says: I like it, what’ll you do to fix it though?

Frank says: well, the time machine has to work first

Sophie twists her black hair and says nothing

I look up and wish for a time machine more than anything, I wish and wish and wish and I can feel my throat getting thick and sore so I say nothing too

At home

At night

Doing homework

I look at other variables besides x

There is y and z and sometimes m and i

i stands for imaginary

And I like the way the word feels in my mouth, the vowels, the soft G sound

Dad hovers over the pasta pot like he’s trying to steam away the pores in his skin

With the heat like this, already suffocating, I wish he would back up and crack a cold one

But he doesn’t drink anymore

I asked him why, once,

I need to feel it, he said

There’s nothing to celebrate, he said

I need to feel it just like this

He stirs the bubbling pasta, the water transforms into an ugly starch that I know will be hard to clean off the metal

He used to be the chef of the family, would celebrate by cooking us fancy meals with cilantro and mint and almost always a form of potato –

But now I do most of the grocery shopping and we eat a lot of cereal because I never know what to buy and food is different than it used to be, living in this flooding, bug-riddled, jungle world

Dad’s old olive green shirt slags over him, he wears heavy, oversized shirts that used to fit him so I won’t see the edges of his bones, just the sweat seeps through the fabric

He seems so small without her here

If I gaze around him, not through the window but between the triple panes,

I can see him back when his clothes still fit right

I see him beer-handed and merry with teeth-showing laughter

I see him tugging on Christmas lights and swearing at them

I see him dancing around our Christmas-lit living room, swaying his embarrassing hips to “Jingle Bell Rock”, nudging at her with them until she joins him

i is for imaginary

In silence, we eat soggy, overcooked pasta with cold marinara sauce

Rabbit lost his mom in the first flood that no one was ready for,

She’d taken some pills and drunk some wine and when the water came during the blinding night it just ate her up

He lives with his uncle now, who, in a sincere effort to provide what was lost gives Rabbit almost anything he wants (except beer, apparently the uncle knows better than that)

The day I went back to school after my mom

I thought maybe we’d share something, Rabbit and me,

Because while others had lost things, no one else had lost anything so severe

But at first he couldn’t talk to me

And then he could talk to me but couldn’t look at me

And I was delicate without him, the only person who might know, feel, something, might tell me what to do, how to survive this next second –

But the first day he looked at me, after my mom, he blushed so hard and hot, and I knew he saw me as a mirror that could only crack and shatter all over him

And I understood

That night, Dad told me to don my lightweight daisy-yellow sweatsuit with my wetsuit underneath it and he drove us to the pond

Why are we here? I asked

Mom used to come here to think, he said.

Before everything went wrong.

This is the spot mom became my fiancé, and then my wife,

This is the spot we named you,

And when things got bad,

This is the place Mom told me she would never give up, even if it killed her.

That is why we’re here.

I broke into the water, let it splash around my cheeks, with my eyes closed I saw bubbles form and rise above me as I sank, let the blur and chill hold me, and from beneath the surface I swear I could hear Rabbit’s edging voice calm and clear and also somewhat broken, and he was saying you and me, you and me

Toward the end, Mom had a fever so high she forgot who I was, who dad was, where she lived, and it’s the fear and confusion on her bleak, blanched face I remember best before she stopped breathing

She kept asking for something to drink and I gave her ice chips which she spit out at me

Mom lost consciousness and I thought of her dancing around the living room with dimples and love sewed into her face

She danced with AirPods in her ears so I wouldn’t hear all the swearing that her favorite artists sang,

And so it always seemed like she danced to silence,

And she shimmied and threw up her arms and she swayed and pulled and jumped

And pretended she was that girl she from way back when,

In a club that must have had bouncing lights and beer-sticky floors and friends loudly shouting for one another, reaching and stretching and embracing and grinding

Dad would watch her, grinning so wide I thought his lips might crack open, because he remembered and knew and loved all of her –

I have a video on my phone of it that I won’t watch

But I’m glad I know it’s there

I’ve been collecting materials for my time machine, Rabbit says between bites of cafeteria pepperoni pizza

And Tyler snorts, rolls his eyes so high I hope they get fucking stuck

Jetta says: what kind of materials?

Frank says: can I help?

Sophie scrapes her elbow skin, smiles, nods, nibbles little bits of one half of her peanut butter and Nutella sandwich that she won’t finish

I feel myself lifting through my gut and esophagus and out of my skin and eyes and ears and mouth and all of me is hovering over our little group, floating with hope-infused lightness, until the real real me looks up and laughs at my hopeful, floating little ghost because i is for imaginary, and I smash back into myself, so full of hate and spite and I laugh and laugh and cry big tear-droplets and wobble away laughing so hard I can’t walk straight

Later: Jetta and Frank and Sophie fold their arms and pout their lips,

They sit me down in the abandoned, post-lunch cafeteria for a scolding,

You hurt his feelings, they say, one of them or two of them or all of them,

Jetta says: of all people

Frank says: we thought you’d be the one to get it

Sophie uncrosses her arms and hands me the second, untouched half of her peanut butter and Nutella sandwich

I’m sorry? I say, and wince

Two pairs of arms fold even more across their collective bodies, if that’s possible, like they’re trying to shield themselves from my insincerity

Jetta says: we’re not the ones you should apologize to

Frank says: go talk to him, figure it out, it’s your mess

Sophie drinks her chocolate milk with a straw, still somehow manages to spill a little on the chest of her favorite lavender colored sweatsuit

I take a too-big of bite of Sophie’s sandwich and have to chew for a long time before I can swallow

The alarm bell rings

Students should pack their belongings and head home, storm warning, preceding the storm an insect warning, keep your sweatsuits pulled tight with hoods and masks on, socks pulled up over your sweatsuits – once home, stay home, stay indoors

Everything will have to wait until tomorrow

I stare out my bedroom window with my hair down, in a crop top and a pair of pink and skimpy gym shorts on, watch the storm tear through the trees and think how free it would feel to go outside just now, with nothing else covering my skin, the bugs all hiding from the storm, just like us, but me out in the thick of it, dancing while the water spills down until time stops and the sky drowns me

I dream of kissing Rabbit everywhere except his beautiful, blabbering mouth

A knock at my door in my dreams

Rushes me up to real life

The storm is gushing, raging, against my window, and I hear Dad swishing down the stairs, unlocking the door,

The sound of the storm swirls inside our home until the door clicks and it stops

Muffled voices; people downstairs

I hurry down still in my crop top and shorts

Rabbit and his uncle stand there in hurricane coats, leftover rain sluices down them and forms little puddles on the floor

He won’t look up at me

Men talk and I don’t hear them, just stare at the mouth I didn’t kiss and couldn’t kiss and won’t tell him that I didn’t and I couldn’t

Dad says: take off your coats, come on in, we’ll fix some tea

Dad says: we had a generator put in years ago, so grateful for it now,

Dad says: make yourselves at home

Rabbit wilts into our cream-colored couch, puts up his sock-feet on the coffee table

Hasn’t even brought his phone

His uncle says something about being underwater that I don’t quite catch

Men stand together in the kitchen and wait for the teapot to boil

I sit on the coffee table next to Rabbit’s ankles, rest my naked feet next to his slouching hips

I’m sorry, I say

He shrugs

No, I mean like –

Rabbit leans forward:

You don’t have to say it,

You shouldn’t,

It was a stupid idea

It’s not stupid, I say

Isn’t it? I think

Isn’t it stupid to hope for things to change, to reverse, to edit themselves, delete, start over?

Come with me, I say

Rabbit follows me into my bedroom and we sit on the floor

What would you do with your time machine, I ask

Bring back Mom

I nod

I know

I get brave

Tomorrow, whenever the storm ends, let me bring you somewhere

Okay, he says

Okay

I give him a fluffy white pillow and he sleeps on the floor like a child, his knees curled to his breast, the blanket tucked into his elbow like he’s pretending to squeeze an old brown teddy bear

I try not to be such a creep and watch him as his chest rises and falls

Tears gently fall down his cheeks, across his nose, wet my pillow, but he doesn’t wake up

10.

Still raining but the wind doesn’t whip and the tree branches are still

We go out in our wet suits with hurricane coats on top

Dad and Uncle grumble but won’t let us go alone,

We pile in Dad’s truck and drive, the rain making no sound against the window glass,

The only sound the firing engine

At the round pond Rabbit and I shed the coats and dive on in,

Rabbit follows me to the middle where we tread cold water and our breath comes staggered and uneven

His scorching, cutting face the only thing above the surface

Like this, I say, you hold your breath, and hold my hands, and we plunge in, sink as far as you can, stay there as long as you can

Why? he asks

You’ll get it when you try

We make loud sounds as we suck our breath in and break the surface tension

Into my, our, blurred, chilled world, and his hands find mine and squeeze them

And everything in the world is dark

But nothing is broken

And nothing hurts

We live in temporal suspension

Kat Ellison graduated from Johns Hopkins’ MA in Writing Program and lives in the woods of southern Vermont. This will be Kat's second published piece. Her debut publication appeared in Litbreak Magazine in December, 2024. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Anne Anthony

Kat F. Ellison

Underneath the Surface Tension

Judith Lysaker

Does It Have Pockets