In the month between her mother’s death and her own suicide, Giovanna went
on vacation to the South of France.
You’ve had a shock,
they said.
Live a little. Get some air. Provence is nice, you could go there.
Giovanna did as she was told. She traded in her vacation time and her
savings for one round-trip ticket to Marseilles. Her airplane tilted
dangerously, the Mediterranean on one side, the sun on the other.
Have a breather,
they said, as if she had never breathed before. As if she had to be told
how to do it. As if grief were just this: a condition of not knowing how to
properly breathe.
The man in the aisle seat reached over her to close the window shade, his
arm brushing her breasts.
Take some personal time, they said.
The shock of landing jolted her neck from her spine, upending her purse,
sending breath mints, tampons, half a chocolate bar, dried-up pens, makeup,
digestive tablets and eye-wetting drops in all directions. Giovanna knelt
in the aisle, picking up wrappers. Men in black suits frowned and nudged
her with pleated pant legs.
Enjoy yourself!
#
The wheels of Giovanna’s new suitcase stuck in the cobblestones of the old
city. The wind was beginning to howl, lifting café awnings and wave crests.
Women in long white dresses floated past, disappearing down streets that
coiled instead of crossing.
Live a little, they said, she would have wanted you to.
Giovanna’s hotel room had a framed picture of a lavender field, a rusty
bathtub, an open window so high she could not reach it, and a bed hard as a
gravestone. When she dropped her suitcase on the bedspread, the Dust of
Ages lifted up and floated back down.
Live!
Giovanna walked down the stairs into the night.
You get one chance, she said to the relentless cicadas creaking out mortality and desire. Convince me.
#
Go to Aix-en-Provence, they said, The Cathedral has two(!) gothic naves!
So the next day, a Monday, Giovanna matched a bus to a picture in her
guidebook and sweated out a bottle of rosé down a highway that was exactly
the same as all the other highways except that the signs were blue.
But, in Aix-En-Provence, Giovanna found only Robert.
Robert was lounging on the marble steps of the two-gothic-nave cathedral,
smoking a cigarette. He looked so spiderlike in his tight jeans that she
thought maybe that was what he was, a spider, what he’d been this whole
time. She thought of him sprawled, skinny-legged, against her shower tile,
crawling up her thighs, blinking at her through architectural glasses. If
he was just a spider, she might be able to forgive him.
“Robert,” she said, naming him, as if to staple him in place.
“Giovanna,” he said, as if he hadn’t disappeared from a place he was
supposed to be, i.e., their marriage, and reappeared in a place he didn’t
belong, i.e., her Personal Time Vacation.
“Are you one of the knaves?” she asked. His mirrored sunglasses smiled.
“Are you one of the gargoyles?” he returned, in a way that made her
conscious of her posture. She straightened. Looked up. The cathedral was
Gothic, looking less built than scribbled by someone trying to get their
pen to work. There was indeed a gargoyle missing.
They had lunch—of course they had to—in a restaurant that had looked
cheerful but was empty and bleach-smelling inside. A waiter with a grave
face and a missing hand brought them menus. His other hand was long and
maggot-fingered.
“My mother died,” Giovanna announced over her menu. “How are you?”
Robert talked about work. “We’re on the breaking point of something big.”
During their marriage, he had always been on the breaking point of something big.
The waiter appeared and set before them two large empty plates.
“Is there going to be food?” Giovanna asked. She wanted her voice
to be devastating.
The fish, when it came, was full of bones.
#
Giovanna had first met Robert one night after work. She had looked up from
her newspaper and found him sitting across the table from her. She had been
eating alone, avoiding the dusty restaurant mirrors and their
disappointments, a disappointment she had seen reflected on so many blind
dates she had been tricked into, the men arriving to find that although she
was an Italian woman, she wasn’t that kind of Italian woman. She
wasn’t flat-haired-gelato-eating-Vespa-sexy. She was heavy-footed,
frizzy-haired, and had the gift of making everything she wore look
wrinkled. Her eyes were a little too wild. Her nose was in the way. She
often spilled her drink trying to check her watch. Robert had smiled and
eaten one of her French fries. Later, she wondered if he had just been very
hungry.
Giovanna had called her mother. Through the receiver, she heard her
mother’s house: crack of old leather, rustle of flowered wallpaper, wooden
clock ticking, wolf shutters firmly shut. She heard her mother reach into
the pocket of her blouse for her pendulum. There was the slink of chain.
She heard the pendulum swinging around and around, emphatically, in the
wrong direction.
“You will not marry him, Giovanna.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” she said, gripping the receiver.
“Giovanna, come home.”
Behind her, Robert had tilted her head up to the mirror. For the first
time, Giovanna could see that her eyes were green as razor leaves, that her
lips were boyish and playful, that she had a smile. She had married Robert.
Shortly thereafter, he’d skittered, the same way he was getting ready to do
now, on her personal-time vacation, thin legs tapping at the restaurant
floor.
Giovanna thought of the cathedral’s missing gargoyle. She imagined it
tipping over one morning, maybe after a storm, and plunging, ugly face
screaming at the imminent ground.
She stood up before the check arrived.
“Goodbye Robert,” she said. They shook hands. His palm tingled webbily.
#
You’ll love the fishermen, they said. So Giovanna woke at dawn to watch them sail into port. She was
disappointed but not surprised that every fisherman wore the face of her
mother. It was too familiar: brown eyes, tight brown curls, frown
underlined three times, this on every fisherman, under red Cousteau hats,
zipped into hoods, wrapped around a cigarette, facing the sun. The
fishermothers emerged from the orange sunrise fishless, but with armfuls of
octopus. These, they dumped on the port, on the pavement, right there, each
boat matched to its own tentacled pile, gray, brine-smelling, sickly, and
when she approached, every tentacle reached out as if to say, Giovanna, come home.
Of course you didn’t touch them, did you Giovanna?
her employer would say.
Giovanna leaned in. A tentacle curled around and around her ring finger.
Warmed by the sun, it wasn’t slimy but soft, skinlike, suckers glistening.
When her mother was alive, Giovanna sometimes imagined her disappearing.
Her eyes would stumble upon wooden containers: boxes, cupboards, drawers,
and she would imagine she could fit her mother inside, just for a day, just
for an hour, just long enough to leave the apartment and cross the street
to the pastry shop with the window that reflected the sky.
“10 Euros.”
Giovanna turned. The fisherman behind her was rocking his boat with one
foot. This one did not have the face of her mother. He had round tanned
shoulders. He wore his full lips to one side. He was small and hairy.
Giovanna liked small hairy men. They were accessible.
“10 Euros,” he said again. As if she were going to steal his octopus. Or
buy it? Take this octopus back to the hotel, and what then? Teach it to
juggle? Take it to bed? Tie one tentacle around her neck, swing another
over a light fixture, and jump off a chair?
Well it might stretch, but it would hold.
#
Giovanna walked back to the hotel holding a bag with an octopus inside. The
bag sweated: octopus blood, octopus spit, octopus water, all running down
her legs. In front of her, a boy stood pressed into a doorway, between two
buildings. She smiled at him. Two more boys came running around a corner,
side by side, muscled shoulders sweating, unschooled fish. The boy between
the buildings met her eyes and shook his head. She looked away. A man set
his watch to the cathedral clock and kept on walking.
The octopus slid slowly out into her rusty bathtub. It crawled under the
faucet and compressed itself in the recess of the drain. Giovanna closed
the door softly and went back to bed.
#
Go to the open market,
they said.
Well the problem with the open market was that it was too full of babies.
That’s what the olives looked like to Giovanna: screaming, oily baby faces.
For three Euros, you could buy a bag full, and if you got close enough, the
saleswoman would pop one into your mouth. Giovanna was terrified that the
woman would pop an olive into her mouth.
Another stall was piled high with fish.
This is how you scale a fish, Giovanna, with your thumb, with your
thumb
.
Once when Giovanna was a girl, there had been a fish on the kitchen
counter, a silver fish, a wishing fish, its shining scales like pieces of
sky.
Go on, with your thumb, her mother had said. Giovanna did as she was told. In the bowl, the
silver scales dimmed. From wish to gray, they died.
Put them back, Giovanna had cried.
In a store window, a school of silver kitchen knives swam upstream,
glinting.
You took them off, you cannot put them back. Learn, Giovanna. This is
how you clean a chicken. This is how you chop an onion. This is how you
should cry. This is how. This is how. Learn, Giovanna. Why don’t you
come home? Why don’t you cry?
Giovanna left the market, an oily film of olive still in her mouth. Her
mother watched her from inside certain doorways, frowning in
disappointment, framed between red geraniums like a postcard.
The octopus was still in her bathtub. It was beginning to expand,
purple-gray tentacles spiraling out like galaxies.
Outside, a wind was rising. She could hear it howling over the waves, over
the port, around the coiling streets. Now the shutters of the too-high
window in her hotel room opened. Closed. Opened. Closed. Openclosed.
Giovanna could not reach them.
Every summer, Giovanna’s mother had left her alone for one month, a
pilgrimage. Giovanna, stay inside, remember the wolves. Giovanna
knew that if she opened the front door, she would find nothing outside but
a growl, blood-matted fur, a silence of tearing teeth. Learn, Giovanna. Before leaving, her mother would sometimes reach
into a wooden drawer and take out several cards soft with age. She dealt
them on the table: a pale rider on a pale horse, a devil, and one that had
nothing on it but red. Stay home, Giovanna. Her mother’s wolves
walked on two legs and were as tall as a man and would eat her from the
inside until she was just a sheath of skin, a picture of a girl with green
eyes. When the front door shut, every door and drawer in the house came
ajar with the probability of teeth.
The night after Robert left, Giovanna had met the wolves. They had come out
from a door left ajar inside her. Their devastation was terrible.
When she was twelve, Giovanna stayed in the apartment, counting the clock
ticks. When she was thirteen, she peered through the shutters, looked out
into the street and saw no wolves, only the pastry shop with its sky-blue
windows and something pink on a shelf inside. When she was fifteen,
Giovanna flung open the door, ran down the stairs, and never came home. She
made it to a big city where she worked at a travel agency never going
anywhere.
Now the wolves were outside her hotel room, at the door, howling at the
wind. Open. Closed. The taste of olive was still in her mouth. Open.
Closed. Somewhere outside, a boy was hiding from other boys in a crevice of
sandstone.
From the bathroom, the octopus said, come home, Giovanna. Open.
Closed. Why don’t you cry, Giovanna. Open. Closed. Come home. Openclosedopenclosedopenclosed.
“Enough!”
#
On Thursday, Giovanna went looking for her mother. Every street had a
church and every church had a Madonna, pink or blue or black. Every
pedestal was carved Madre de Dio, but to Giovanna, it always looked like
Matricide.
She found the right church. Like her mother, it was made of stone and
pointed at the sky. Giovanna climbed the stairs.
On your knees, Giovanna. Openclosed. Howl the wolves.
Giovanna walked back down the marble steps. She went to her knees. They
cracked. The brown fabric of her skirt stretched. She had to lift it up to
climb. Around her, in the streets, in cafes, people turned to look. The
stone scraped her skin.
Inside, incense spiraled. The smell of woods, the smell of stone, the smell
of blood. Under her knees, Giovanna felt water. Every church is built on a river, Giovanna. She straddled the
aisle, feeling for current. She looked for her mother in the pews. There
were three old men, piled against one another, asleep. She looked for her
mother in the font. It was dry. She looked for her mother behind the altar,
in the reliquary, not the whole mother, just the hand: red-tinted nails, a
red cut-off wrist, long fingers clutching a pendulum in a tight fist, on a
turquoise cushion brocaded in gold. The reliquary was empty except for a
wooden coin box labeled Penitance. Giovanna dropped a coin.
Nothing happened. She dropped more coins and bought candles, arranged them
in a row on the stone floor. She lit them, one after another.
On the wall was a painting of Mater Dolorosa, a bleeding heart pierced by
seven daggers, sorrowful, lacrimating red blood.
You don’t think that’s a little too much?
she asked.
She looked into the flickering candles. She tried to remember. Hadn’t there
been a time when she was sick, a child, and felt a cold hand on her
forehead? Was there a time a bird flew into the promise of the window, and
Giovanna’s mother had made it fly again? Or was that a story? She thought
of her mother’s hand on her face. She thought of her mother’s smile, Giovanna, dessert! She thought of her mother’s pendulum, Giovanna, learn! She was scrapekneed on the stone surrounded by
candles in front of a bleeding heart—what else, she thought, do you want me to do?
Now, Giovanna said. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now!
She waited.
Nothing came.
#
In the hallway of her hotel, she could smell the octopus, a smell like
brine and algae and rotten strawberries, so thick the air was purple with
it, coating her throat. She walked into the bathroom. The octopus sagged
like an old woman in an upholstered flower print chair.
You are late, Giovanna.
She sat on the toilet and leaned in to look, the collar of her shirt over
her nose. A drop of water from the faucet landed on the octopus head and
made a rubbery brown kind of sound.
What do you want, Giovanna?
What did she want? For a second, she made the pendulum in her mind swing
backwards. She imagined a warm kitchen. There would be tomato sauce on the
stove, hazing the air with warmth and wine. She imagined her mother’s hand
on her salty wet face. In this version, her mother would have brought her
back to the kitchen, sat her down before the bowl of dead fish scales. She
would have made a paste of flour and water, stirring it with a fork, learn, Giovanna. Together, they would have picked each of the
tarnished scales from the bowl, each gray flake, they would dip in paste
and restore on the fish where it belonged. When the work was done, her
mother would take her hand and place it over the fish. Giovanna would have
felt the scales come to silver life, sharp as a grate, electric. Her mother
would have opened the door for Giovanna herself, Run, Giovanna,
and outside the apartment, instead of a dark hallway with no light at the
end, there would be sun, yellow sand trespassing onto brown tile, piling
onto the door jamb, Run! and Giovanna would have run, fish
flapping in her hand, to the wolfless sea.
Now, in the yellow tiled hotel bathroom with a watercolor of lavender
behind glass, Giovanna leaned over the bathtub. She extended her hand one
last time until she encountered the octopus. It was warm, feverish.
Tentacles wound tight around Giovanna’s stroking hand. Scooping the head,
she lifted the thing up, adjusting her hands to keep her fingers from
piercing the soft skin. She turned on the cold water. It splashed over the
octopus and her hand. She held both under the stream, washing it, stroking
its softening head. She unwrapped the first tentacle.
Once, in her mother’s house, she had been awakened by a woman crying. The
women who came to visit her mother were often crying. They did not stop at
the pastry shop. They came at night. They paid what they could. One girl
paid in silver fish. She had turned to look at Giovanna through a crack in
the door.
Giovanna unwrapped a second tentacle. Once a year, Giovanna’s mother would
go on pilgrimage, but once a week, they would go together to kneel on the
church steps and feel the current beneath. She thought of the taste of the
olive she could not get rid of. She thought of the bronze boy hidden in the
crevices of the yellow streets, the other boys chasing after him.
The last tentacle clung to her wrist.
Once, Giovanna had braved the wolves and run down the apartment’s coiling
stairs, out the big wooden door, so blinded by the light that a dark blue
car swerved to miss her on the street. In the pastry shop, the baker had
his back turned. Giovanna pushed the door open, slid her arm into the
window display, and took the tiny pink cake from the shelf. Looking up at
her apartment from the outside, she brought it to her mouth with shaking
fingers. There was the initial ecstasy of sugar, the sinking of teeth, and
then another feeling so big it filled her. She had waited too long. This
cake was only there for display. And even through the crumbling mold, she
knew it had never tasted exactly like sky. Learn, Giovanna.
The final tentacle slid off her wrist. She gathered the octopus and lifted
it out of the bathtub, tucking it carefully back into its bag. She had to
fold each arm over in the plastic. The smell followed her down the hallway,
down the stairs, and into the yellow streets.
Giovanna found a square with an open well, so deep she could not see the
bottom, only smell the coolness of moss. She looked over her shoulder.
Empty. She dangled the bag over the abyss, feeling the octopus shift around
inside it. She tilted her wrist and let the bag slide. Splotch. A last
layer of skin around her heart came loose and bled through her ribcage,
dripping down her thighs.
#
On Friday night, Giovanna returned to the fisherman port. She avoided the
face of the boys who all seemed to look at her, interrogating her face. The
sun was setting, mirrored in the ocean. Blue cloud streaks hung in the
opposite sky below, and the boats rolled in it like skeletons, like wooden
ghosts. They pulled in their currents, every rope screaming at its post.
Giovanna planted her feet, fighting the urge to run.
Her small hairy fisherman was at his same post, rocking his boat with his
other foot.
“10 Euros!” he said, recognizing her.
Giovanna blushed, guilty. The bag. The well.
“I do not have your . . .” but she did not know how to say octopus in
French.
“I do not have your, the thing,” she said, undulating.
He smiled, mouth to the left again.
Giovanna remembered the way he had jumped from boat to port. The way he
wound the barnacled rope with strong arms. She found her razorleaf smile.
She tried to look like a mooring post.
#
In her hotel room, the fisherman stepped close. On his lips, octopus
smelled fresh. His hairs were soft. He tried to pick her up. He was too
small or she was too earthbound. He could barely move her. Giovanna thought
of her desk at work, with the cactus from her colleague and the yellow
coffee mug that said “You can do it!” She reached out, slid one arm under
his shoulder, and heaved. The fisherman’s blue canvas shoes floated up into
the air. He looked at her, leathered skin cracking in surprise. She bent to
slide her other arm under his knees, and lifted. He weighed about as much
as a small tree, an office ficus. This way, his weight in her arms like a
tray of coffee, she carried him to bed. Through the night, he wound himself
around her, always seeming to have another arm, to touch her face, to hold
her waist, to keep her from rolling off the bed.
Once, in the night, Giovanna woke to find the fisherman sleeping face down,
nose squashed against the hard bed. She reached out and touched his arm.
Under the hair, it was sleek with seawater and still warm from the sun. She
had not known, until then, the taste of the ocean, its texture the way it
smoothed over jagged reefs, drew back, engulfing rocks, swirling into
spaces and coming back together whole. Almost entirely unlike tears, but
maybe close enough.
#
Giovanna woke again, noon light in her eyes, a thin white sheet wound
around her body, her eyelids weighted as if by coins. She pulled the sheet
off, opened her eyes. The bed was empty. The cover was bunched. Giovanna
patted them down hard. Empty. She threw the pillows to the ground. They
made no sound. She looked under the bed. She looked behind the headboard at
the ghost outline on the wallpaper. She ripped the sheets off, the mattress
cover off, the mattress off, down to the boxspring, down to the skeleton,
and then she searched the sheets again.
There was no small hairy fisherman. Not in her bathroom. Not in her
suitcase. Not in her pockets. She was alone.
Giovanna watched herself cry in the bathroom mirror.
“Now, you cry?” she asked herself in a familiar voice. The outer edges of
her skin, untouched, ballooned away from her. Alone. And still the voices.
What did you learn, Giovanna?
Have a little fun, Giovanna?
She looked in the mirror and watched the little yellow tears that coiled
around her cheekbones. Behind them was a woman in her adult years. Not a
girl, not a cupcake in a window. Her eyes were still green, but there was a
coldness to them. She saw behind her the painting of lavender behind glass.
She saw their Giovanna, the disappointment underlining her eyes.
Her nose was in the way. The glass was in the way. She, Giovanna, was in
the way, a still life, nature morte: wilting flowers, an
openmouthed skull, a piece of meat and diffused light that announced “too
late to this feast.” And it was because of that, because she was on her
Personal Time Vacation, that she wrapped her still-briny fist with bed
sheet, stalked back to the mirror, drew her fist back and threw, hard. She
felt something give, her knuckles or the mirror, didn’t matter, pulled
back, hit again, this time freeing the mirror into a thousand shards that
glittered fishlike in their element, free.
There was a line of red blood between her knuckles, so she pulled out her
purse. She noticed that her wallet was thin. Opened it. Her euros were
gone. There was a thin line of salt around the clasp. There was another
line of salt near the door, where she found a coil of barnacled rope. So he
had been there, her fisherman. He was gone, but he’d left the rope. He was
gone, but he’d left salt. He was gone except for the feeling of Ocean.
I had an affair, she pictured her telling her colleagues. And then I went out into the sun. She smiled. Put on lipstick. She
found her way to an outdoor café. She ordered a bottle of rosé. As an
afterthought, she ordered octopus. She did not eat, only skewered.
#
Across the square, the men played a game with bronze balls. Bocce,
Pétanque, Boules. Their white t-shirts crawled up around their bellies.
There was also a woman. She was tall, her hair wild, draped in red cloth.
She smoked a pipe. Her skirts were yellow, green, and red, layered. She had
dark eyebrows and hairs sprouting from a thick chin. Every inch of her
exposed skin was lit by the sun. She looked back at Giovanna. She moved her
pipe to the side of her red mouth, exhaling smoke.
Giovanna felt a smile crumble over her face.
The woman turned to pick up a shiny ball.
Around them, the game continued. Beyond her, as if on parade, all the boys:
size of an olive, size of a bicycle, size of a wheelbarrow, skinny or
thick-legged, spiderlike or hairy. Beyond them, women in dresses, women on
Vespas, fishermen, the smell of the ocean and the cicadas and their endless
alternating cries of love and loss and life. At the table next to her, the
old man raised a glass of rosé to his lips.
The woman with the bronze ball squinted at the game, a sapphire of sweat
navigating her upper lip hair (dark) and cheek hair (also dark), and the
sky descended lower and lower as all the light condensed in the square,
scattering shadows. In one motion, the woman threw her skirts to the side,
aimed, leaned, threw, a movement too perfect, like a wave. Her ball caught
the sun, hit the dust, rolled, bounced, and struck another ball, displacing
it. The balls clanged. Behind Giovanna, the cathedral bells clanged. The
men raised their arms. The woman put the pipe back into her mouth and
walked away down the yellow streets, pausing at an intersection, her shadow
so tall it stung Giovanna’s eyes.
Giovanna ordered another bottle of wine. The afternoon widened into
whispering cicadas and dust and eucalyptus. A wind brought the sea. The
light was dimming and Giovanna was just a little bit drunk.
The hotel room had been cleaned as if she had never been there. The mirror
shards were gone, the bathtub scrubbed, the shutters closed. There was
nothing left on the list they had given her.
Tomorrow, it would be time to leave the hotel, the two-nave-cathedral, the
markets with their screaming olives. One more day and Giovanna would fly
back to her empty apartment, to the black telephone with her mother’s voice
still in it, to the package unwrapped on her dining room table. It had
contained her mother’s pendulum, red nail polish, and a scrap of matted
gray fur, blood brown at the tip, wolf-like.
To tie the barnacled rope around her home window, now that would be the
hardest part. She would have to distract herself from her hands, from the
little girl behind the shutters crying, from the fading fish in the bowl.
Something bigger would have to prevail; not shame, not guilt, just desire
and the glass between her and sweetness. The movement of her hands would be
silent. She would take her shoes off first, then her scarf, if any. It
would be simple, maybe a little frustrating, tying the knot, like trying to
open an umbrella. Not fear. Something else. Not fear, but the feeling of
pushing the shutters open to look outside. Not fear, but the desire to
encounter the light and catch it like a bronze ball in mid-air. Not fear,
but the possibility, finally, of opening the door to the sea. Not fear, but
a simple exchange: one knot a fair price for courage on her last day of
personal time vacation. What would she do on that last day? Wade into the
ocean and let the fish flitter around her legs? Share a morning wine and
cigarette with the men at the café? Spring out of bed, run down the dark
hallway to the light? Walk down to the square and find the woman? Would she
smile? If the woman smiled back, would she plant her calves, so strong into
the ground that nothing could uproot her? Would she write a postcard home?
#
She looked at the window in her hotel room. It was still too high. The
shutters were closed fast. She pulled the bed over to the window wall. It
screamed over the floor, scraping the linoleum. Giovanna stepped onto the
bed. She reached for the window. Still too high. She could feel the
shutters threaten to openclose.
Giovanna bent her knees and pushed. She jumped, bedsprings squeaking,
frizzy hair flying up and down. She bounced, her skirt lifting up and
around her hips. She jumped again, one two three, grabbed the
window ledge, pulled herself up by wobbly arms, hoisting herself up and
over the window, and slammed the shutters open.
The wooden frame, brown and thick, worn by salt air, dug into her spreading
stomach. The frittering clay of the window ledge smelled like the rivers it
came from. Tiny specks of it ran from her fingers and disappeared into the
wind.
Below, the winding streets lit pink and orange by the setting sun. Below,
cicadas, the smell of anise, a guitar. Giovanna leaned into the wind. Past
the labyrinth of the city, the sea, dark-watered, furious with life, with
waves, seagulls, tentacles, plastic bags, flying fish, swimmers, fishing
boats, tourist boats, sailboats, crashing waves, Coke bottles, rocks,
starfish, seaweed, jellyfish, dolphins. It stirred as if there was so much
below the surface, the water could not keep it submerged, it would all
eventually undrown. And everything moved, and everything pulled at the
moon, and all the rest of the creatures reached upwards, demanding to live.