By Sandra Khalil

This morning, Broad Creek is higher than I’ve ever seen it. The water sloshes over the edge of the porch, creating an arc of wetness that seeps into the wood. The grasses that, last night, stretched to the horizon are gone; they’re waving, somewhere, far below the surface. 

My husband grew up here. When we moved down from Chicago, he said that our daughter would grow up never seeing the same view twice from her window, as if her world, like his, should be framed by that which doesn’t remain.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said when I told him that I found the view unnerving, that, when the ocean peeled back, like a dog bearing its teeth,  it only reminded me of all the things I would find washed up beneath the house: tangles of algae, clumps of plastic, and, one time, an overturned horseshoe crab wedged in the muck, its tiny legs still jerking with the electrical current of life.

What my husband doesn’t understand is that the water I grew up next to has no relation with the moon. Lake Michigan has no rhythms, no secrets. Only the rustle of its surface from time to time. Only wind on water.

A bird sounds, a tiny, familiar coo, and it takes me a moment to realize that it’s not a bird at all but Lily, awake, upstairs.

*

Before Ben, I spent three years loving, then unloving, the wrong man. I broke up with Joe after he had been fired from Starbucks for the second time. It wasn’t about the money — I had a good job, good enough for the both of us — but I wondered how we would ever be able to make real life decisions together if he couldn’t even get to work on time.

But living with Joe had made living without him impossible. Alone, I watched myself go through the motions of my evenings — fixing dinner, loading the dishwasher — as if I was sitting on the shelf, watching myself from outside my own body. I lasted only one week before I rang his bell, still covered with a label that contained both of our last names.

The next time I appeared, like a junkie on his doorstep, he opened the door only wide enough to say, “You don’t want me, you’re just lonely.”

*

Upstairs, Lily stops crying the moment she sees me. “Hey, baby girl,” I say, watching as she tracks me across the room, her face turning up like a full moon by the time I’m standing over her. I pick her up, feeling the warm weight of her in my hands and sit in the rocking chair, where the curtain is cracked just enough for the morning light to cover her face as she latches to my breast.

“Hey, baby girl,” I say again, and she smiles, milk bubbling from the corners of her tiny mouth.  

I had birthed her with both palms up against the wall, with a strength born of the conviction that she alone could save me. That after her birth, my husband’s betrayal, along with the placenta and the blunt end of the umbilical cord, would be rolled up in disposable bedding and left at the hospital.

But trauma, I had learned in the days after Lily’s birth, unlike a baby, never leaves the body. The brain simply fails to file the memories away, so that they are stuck, anchored in the present, as real to the body as the original trauma itself. I imagine the moment I saw Ben fucking that other woman — her blond hair, the hammer of my heart — and know now that I will never forget.

In my arms, Lily’s mouth moves in concentrated hunger. She catches sight of her own hand, tiny fingers spread in the morning light and waves it side to side, side to side, before slapping it down against my breast. 

*

On the porch, the tide is receding. A cornfield emerges where before there was a sea, the long spears of grass cutting the surface of the water. Ben keeps telling me I’ll get used to it, but what I hear is that if I could just let go, then it would be as though nothing had ever happened.

“Stay with me,” Joe had whispered the night I came back, the night he opened the door and lead me to the bedroom that still smelled like us. That night, as if sensing it was our last, I had watched my own body as if it was the body of someone else: the curve of my breasts, a stomach that rose and fell. My body, naked and adored, was more beautiful than I had ever seen it. I stared at the stars that fell outside his window, and felt his hand move down my back, my skin tightening in trails his fingers left behind.

“I can’t,” I had said to him all those years ago, thinking that what I needed was someone with whom I could build a life, but what I had done was find someone who loved me much less than he ever had.

Next to me, Lily plays on her belly on a blanket in the shade. Her hands reach forward, then out to the sides, her feet kicking, as if she wishes to swim right into the sea.

*  *  *

Sandra Carlson Khalil grew up in Minnesota, but has called the Middle East her home for over a decade. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Contrary Magazine, The Stonecoast Review and SmokeLong Quarterly, where she was a finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2024. She studied literature at Middlebury College and received her MBA from Northwestern University. You can find her work at http://www.sandracarlsonkhalil.com.