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Fiction

Building Bone Islands
an excerpt
by Alexandra Blair

Carolina fills the time with her stories as we wait outside for her friends to show up. People wait for taxis, guarding their luggage fiercely. People find other people waiting for them. They hug and climb into cars, they help each other put bags in car trunks, they smile. Carolina has a silver bracelet on her arm, it rolls up and down her skin as she moves her hands. I’m only half-listening to what she says and I think she knows this too. Her friends come and play loud music in the car until we reach the ferry. I have never been on a ferry before. I say this to them. Her friends get out of the car to find a bathroom but we stay in it, even when the ferry begins to move. Carolina’s not sure what to do with me so to spare her I tell her of the bruises on my spine. She has me turn to the window and pulls up my shirt. Her fingers trace circles around each mark.
“That’s the oddest thing I’ve ever seen. And no one knows why?”

I shake my head. She moves her fingers lightly, slaloming around the bone circles.
“It could be pretty cool. Like a tattoo. Maybe you’re like a squirrel burrowing acorns.” This is not the way in if she wants to talk about it, if she’s hinting to see what I’ll say.

“I’ve never been on a ferry before,” I repeat, lowering my shirt, crawling out of the car. I go upstairs onto the deck. People sit inside a glassed room. There are a few of us outside, in the wind. I see Carolina’s friends huddled against the railing. I wonder how good friends they are to her, if she writes to them when she is gone. I try to remember if I’ve heard their names before. I stand by myself, leaning into the railing. It almost doesn’t feel like a boat, jutting high up from the water. We pass islands that seem like sleeping animals, that at any moment may get up and move away. I turn my bruises into islands. I shift them from skin into water. I make them into an archipelago. My body is the ocean beneath them, I close my eyes, breathe in water, there is nothing to hear, here it’s completely silent.

A bell sounds to guide us back to the cars. I wait for Carolina’s friends at the staircase. To make her think I was talking with them this whole time.

We don’t reach the entrance to hot springs until eight at night. It’s a longer drive then they thought and we get lost twice. It’s dark and pouring rain. We park the car and begin the hike-in to the springs. Everything is soaking. Soon we can’t see anything though we keep walking. We have to look at the sky because it just that much lighter black, to keep our bearings, to delineate the horizon. My shoes are boxes of water, the toes rub against the sidings, nursing blisters. In my head I count our steps. When I reach sixty I start over again. Everything smells of damp wood. One of Carolina’s friends tells us to take off our shoes so we can sense the change in water temperature when we reach the hot springs, to know when to stop walking. But we smell them before feet sensing. The smell of sulfur, of rotten eggs. We fumble with the tents. We talk of how cold we are and how we will spend all day getting pruney in the springs. We divide into pairs.

Inside the cold, domed space Carolina and I take off all our clothes, leaving them in a pile by the tent’s zip entrance. The sleeping bags are wet only in certain parts, we snake into them, shifting in slug movement. We curl into each other. We fill the tent space with warm air from our breath and heat rising off our bodies. It becomes bearable. The uneven landscape beneath the tent floor pushes into us, we adjust to fit its requirements. The soft walls, thick with rain, press into us like a damp second skin.

“You’re so quiet lately,” Carolina murmurs into the rounded humidity. Her voice fills with sleep. I am in my green ocean, the bone islands send out roots that float as seaweed, not reaching for anything.
In the morning Carolina wakes me by thumbing open my eyelids. She kneeling naked on her sleeping bag, braiding her hair down her back.

“See the good thing is we don’t even have to put on clothes.”

The wind carries the smell of the springs, sulfur, rotting eggs. I wrap a towel around my torso. The towel’s still wet, my body tingles, rejecting the damp covering. I help Carolina hang our belongings up on tree branches to have them dry. Carolina’s friends are already at the springs, we hear their voices laugh occasionally. I’m watching Carolina, her every movement, how her body works when she pulls on shirtsleeves, when she looks through her backpack for plastic bags of granola. She tells me I should take off the towel. I shrug my shoulders but leave it on. The pieces still exposed—two arms, legs, ankles, head—are dislocated parts moving in awkward succession as I walk behind her. They wish to abandon me. Even the blind parts—round stomach, hips, breasts, the space between my legs—sigh beneath the towel, disappointed, make rude comments as I walk behind Carolina. Only the small chain of bruises keep their silence, throb purple signals like the bellies of fireflies.
The spring has made a pool into the rocky side of a hill. There is kind of a natural bench hollowed out, encouraged with the weight of people’s bodies over time. Carolina’s friends are there, as well as two other people and a child about five years old. The woman keeps telling the child not to swim, that it’s like a bathtub, just sit still. The child wants to swim and in frustration, pushes pebbles, dirt, and small branches in.
The water is hot. I have to move in slowly. Feet then legs then the rest, arms last. I give up the towel reluctantly. The water is clear, everything is amplified beneath it. The water is flesh colored, holding all our bodies.
“This is purifying water,” says the man who must be the child’s father, “I was just telling them,” pointing to Carolina’s friends, “how it cured my dad’s arthritis. So we brought Macey, this time,” pointing to the child who pulls handfuls of peat, “Because she has earaches.” The water is getting too hot. Everything is amplified; it seems everyone is shouting. My body itches. I’m afraid the water will take away my bruises, that it will erase them and there will be no marks left.

“I love the name Macey,” says Carolina. She’s unbraided her hair. “I think I’m going to have as many children as the names I like.” The couple smiles.

“See, Macey,” they say, “This lady likes your name.” The child shrugs her shoulders, building leaf rafts.
“Macey,” Carolina counts them out on her hands, pushing down a finger with each name, “Clementine,” her skin is rosy from the heat, the freckles on her shoulders like minute, smooth stones, “Harrieta, Philip,” she’s trying to remember the fifth one. I’m already out of the steaming water, sitting on slick stone, hugging my knees into me, taking up as small a space as I can. “Blue,” she says finally, returning her arms beneath the water. The sound of her voice condenses, becomes fog that rolls in through the pine trees.

In my house the people above and below me forget I live between them. The bruises don’t change, don’t grow any bigger, they don’t expand over my body. The other waitresses stop calling me, my answer is the same each time, if I even bother to pick up the phone. I go to work, take people’s orders. Customers tell me I look sad, trying to find a way in, especially those who are alone and don’t want to be alone. At night I watch the cars on the highway from my windows. I create oceans that press against glass panes. I move beneath the weight of water. I send out small bone islands that keep to themselves. I’m learning to breathe with less air. I walk barefoot through the house with my eyes closed. And it is that easy. You just let them go. You just decide not to think of them anymore.

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