/ˈælfə sɛnˈtɔri/ Part The First

Even from several hundred meters away, her feet are clearly visible. Pink socks, it seems, carnation pink like a decomposing hog’s tongue. She’s in what appears to be a large woman’s blouse, gauzy fabric that billows out behind her as she pads along the sand. The shirt her sails, the long neck her mast, and that dark whip of hair? Flag. A flag to match the red one set up by the Red Cross on the shore, meant to mean: these are not safe waters.

On the first day, Dahlia goes out to meet her. Dahlia’s been taken on her parent’s second honeymoon, a word she’ll associate for the rest of her life with Maraschino cherries and ungainly coitus. She doesn’t try to avoid her mother and Samson’s frequent displays of affection, though she doesn’t avoid stating how distasteful she finds it either. It pleases her, to see her skittish skylark skank of a mother go out of her way to find privacy, to avoid her daughter’s critical grin. Dahlia opening the closet to see her mother with her coils fingering Samson’s hair, lipstick marks like tiger stripes.

March the fourth, and Dahlia’s tired of hide-and-go-seek with her skinny Ma and her pseudo Pa. She spots the girl and runs to her, heaving, feet sinking and staining the beach: Dahlia’s size nine cobalt blue Mary-Janes. She wraps her hand on the girl’s shoulder, bony joint coated in thin blouse like white sea-glass.

“Hello,” Dahlia says, bringing the unknown to a standstill. She’s small, smaller even than Dahlia had anticipated, a veritable scrap, shipwreck. The skin in the folds of her knees is pale and clear, but the rest of her is burnt black. The color has spread even to her eyelids, like watercolors, or wildfire.

“Hi.” She answers, quite coolly, turning to face Dahlia. She has a pert nose and squinty eyes, maybe thirteen years old to Dahlia’s seventeen.

“I’m Dahlia,” Dahlia says. This is how she operates, stun, shock, wait for a reaction. This is why Dahlia doesn’t have a boyfriend, and why she couldn’t stay back home while her mother and Samson rode out this vacation. No one wanted to keep her, and no one was willing to leave her alone.

“I’m Mina,” she says, and from that moment (and various moments in the twelve day span that followed) onwards, for the rest of her life, Dahlia will associate pink socks, blouses, boats, bells and dying with that name.

Day Five Of Operation: Befriend Ants.

During our morning snack break, the girls and boys of the eleventh and twelfth grades gather in the cafeteria. It’s not the one we eat lunch in, but a classier area meant for teachers, outfitted with a bar and coffee machine. For half an hour, after third period, the tiled linoleum, the tables and chairs, the glass doors: these are lent to the pandemonium of the older students.

It’s difficult for me to consider myself an “older student”. I’m shy of even first graders, tracing wide arcs around they and their playthings. School feels like a spherical environment, and I take a path lit by an infinite series of great circles. One of few stopping points: the cafeteria.

The tables are always occupied. The galaxy by the windows, threaded by cosmic rays and globular star clusters, all gravitationally bound, wound up tight. The string of outer space accompanying the bar, populated by the old glowing inapproachable. The mess in between, solar wind and magnetic fields, perilous and easy to trip over. I find a chair and carry it with me to the solar system farthest away.

It’s a quaint place where I am comfortable, if plenty superfluous. If they care they say nothing, fixed as they are on breaking past their orbits and poking fun at dwarf planets. There’s a pair of blazar boys, luminous and disruptive, a shiny hypercompact stellar system, a trio of components of the Orion constellation (three vertices of a triangle, Sirius, Procyon and Betelgeuse) and me, the closest thing to a perfect vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum, but you are not nature, you are expansive, wild and intergalactic, spanning light years and eons, you are teenage stars, so, can I ask you, please: don’t hate me.

Day Four Of Operation: Befriend Ants.

When I get to class in the mornings I don’t stray farther than the two foot radius around my desk, and that only to deposit my book bag and take a solid, perfunctory glance around the room. Chalkboard, windows, door; this is my own little private universe, but the sun can be anywhere at all. I don’t know around what I revolve, but I do so willingly.

I am only ever truly tired the five minutes after I wake, but it is not until eleven thirty that I stop telling people I’m exhausted. It’s one of the few conversation openers I know, initiating the inevitable concurrent response, the cycle of shared sleep and lack thereof. “I’m tired.” “I’m tired too.” “How are you?” “Fine.” “Hello!” “Hi.” I am an automaton, I run through lists like names for hurricanes.

For the first time in a while, I hate living in Spain. It’s a feeling that lasts a maximum half hour, but I feel it poignantly, and I feel it absolutely. I can’t do intelligent or passionate discourse in Spanish, despite the fact that I’ve lived here for most of my life. All those who cannot express adoration nor ideals in their mother tongue are failures. On a discrete level in my private universe I am blind to the interpretation of the thoughts of other sentient beings. On a smaller level than even that, lying on the fringe of some dead supernova, I fear that I am blind to their love as well.

There is a sun, but it cannot be pinpointed. There are blue stars too, but they are visible only to those with proper equipment. The only element ever to be mapped here is ground zero, and I already know exactly where that is.

Gorgeous, Gorgeous Amphibian, Clear Glass Windowpane

If the cosmos ever decide to bestow upon me the gift of beautiful photography, this it what I’ll do –

Take one boy, preferably one with a long face and torso, Fitzpatrick skin type IV. Plop him in a poorly-lit changing room, stalls to the left, hooks to the right, no mirrors, no windows. Take off his shirt. Sit him on a bench, one foot up, other on floor, head down. Put his hands on his shoe and his eyes on the tying of the laces, reef knot, the kind used by sailors and surgeons. The air should be full of linoleum, and the mouth of fricative consonants.

Take five steps away and create a miniature of him in the lens, inverted in my eye, shutter.

The anecdote of the boiling frog: if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in tepid water that increases gradually in temperature, it will eventually be cooked to death. 19th century scientists used controlled experiments to validate the claim, but their contemporary counterparts refute it, despite not having conducted experiments of their own.

In my own stupid way I think: how can you know it’s not true? In my own stupid way I think: I want to find out, but I will not. It would be cruel, it would be quite cruel to do so.

A critical thermal maximum, a death, a frog, a human. Throat muscles forcing oxygen and sweetmeats back up, lag, gab, breakdown locomotion. Boys coated in vague light, top hat and they’ll be Victorian, knives and they’ll be butchers. Girls grabbed and plucked, dropped, boil me up, boil me down. Stick your nails underneath my crustacean crust, saltwater shell, and pull, pop me open, ‘course it’ll work because –

the very limits of heat that I can take are locked in you.

The moral sense in mortals is the duty / We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty

At eleven thirty my mother calls my name from the living room. The rise and dip of the E resting into the guttural peace of the A, this Emma, Eeeeeeeemmaaaaaaa, Eeeehmuhhh, if anything, this name means home to me, but only ever when taken from her mouth.

I go and find a room lit by a television screen, and my mother sitting on the blue couch in her nightgown, knees close to her chest in the manner of children. Her back, she says, hurts, and so I take a tube of Bengay and circle the offending area with my hands, very carefully at first, then progressively harder. She does not swear at me for being too rough, a bad sign. She must be in quite some pain, perhaps more than she has been in for a long time.

It occurs to me that often I treat my mother like a baby, but she is not so very young, not anymore. She mentions that it might be the weight of her purse that’s causing her the pain, and I agree, a little too profusely perhaps, to avoid her coming to more dangerous explanations. That afternoon I’d had to spend a while convincing her that she didn’t have cancer, though there was no way I could be sure myself. But I can talk big if she is comforted, it is never a one-way cycle, after all. The oxygen I dedicate to her is always returned to me, when I am scared and require all the usual consolations: that I am strong enough, kind enough, smart enough, capable enough.

One of the loveliest things I’ve seen in my life was a photograph of my sixteen-year-old mother. I saw it once in a moment of idleness and have not seen it since. My mother is in profile, sitting on a bed with her back against the wall, and her long hair is unbearably exotic to me, I, who have only ever seen it cropped close to her jaw. Perhaps I find this photograph so striking because it depicts a time when my mother was close to me in age, something I have difficulty imagining. Will I feel the same way at fifty, looking at pictures of her taken now, and will she seem so wonderful to me as her teenage counterpart does today?

When someone mentions an attractive woman, or I am inspired to think of beauty in its female form, I think of a small kitchen with the doors wide open, and a little balcony where wet blouses hang, and a girl peeling fruit in a plaid dress, standing by a cheap counter made to resemble marble. This girl does not have a face, but her hair is always long.

A tangent that is related, but not by very much:

School starts in five days, and I am frightened, but for one of those reasons difficult to explain to anyone but your mother. We have spoken, and I have partaken of the normal solace, but now that this continues to worry at me I think: maybe I need to carry my own weight sometimes? Maybe it is time the daughter learn to take leave of her mother.

(title from Lolita by Nabokov)

Vacation

These past few days I and the family have been in the north. When you leave a city whose name means strength for a the wide expanse of a wetland 300 kilometers away, you gain more than in the wheel rotation count of your automobile.

When viewed from space, the Ebro Delta looks like the geological capture of a primordial whale’s breaching. Driving up, the terrain I see only confirms this statement: neat squares of rice stalks separated by thin canals could easily be the interlocking cetacean vertebrae.

As we travel, the mountains that define my field of vision recede along a spectrum of color from charcoal to indigo to warm gray, with no apparent logical order in between. These chains of rock, I think, could be substituted for fins in my imaginary whale. Already I am imagining Oparin’s abiogenesis, and my huge aquatic mammal swimming in the soup, though this makes little sense from an evolutionary standpoint. When my brother asks who I named him after, when I am in a good mood I answer, typically, “Alexander the Great”. Maybe next time I shall say “Alexander Oparin” and instruct him to purchase spectacles and grow a goatee.

We emerge from the hotel every morning and drive around the coast. Our oldies station works, miraculously, even amid the teeming mass of mountain. One-hit wonders until the car strikes sand and we unload, bringing Pikachu towels and cheese sandwiches from the trunk and to the shore.

On the first day we visit a curious strip of land that cuts the Mediterranean so that there is visible water on both sides. “You can have your pick,” my father says, as though this lovely dual beach were the product of his own efforts.

After a swim it is decided that we simply must visit a bird viewing tower, and so when she is through with salt water my mother rises and the rest of us follow like a string of ducklings. The depressions her feet make on the sand give me a path and a pattern, staying much after she herself has disappeared from view.