By Kathryn Kulpa

I’m clear. So clear you can see down to my painted blue heart. 

I don’t wave, not for you. For anyone. I’m calm as a cantaloupe, cool as a grocery store’s produce aisle, where purple eggplants bask like sunbathers. I’m the sea without seasickness, without sharks, without the tang of salt, the thirst of boards under a saline sun. Clean as chlorine. No shipwrecks here, no pirate flags, no severed limbs taking a dive to Davy Jones’s locker. 

Still, something falls. Only a child’s toy, a metallic box he’s named and called his pet, spiraling to the bottom, gleaming silver under the sun, it’s easy to see that box, easy to find the bottom, no seagrass, no churning silt, no undertow, nothing to make you think I’m deadly until the splash splits my silence, the crack of skull on cement, the trail of blood curling through water like squid’s ink, the boy drifting in slow circles, sinking down. 

There should be a fierce lightning storm. There should be lashing winds and crashing waves—I wish I had those to offer—but there’s only quiet now. Only stillness. 

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Kathryn Kulpa has stories in Best Small Fictions, Centaur, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Monkeybicycle. Her chapbook For Every Tower, a Princess is published by Porkbelly Press, and A Map of Lost Places is forthcoming from Gold Line Press. She would stay up all night reading if you let her.