Ocean’s Reprise

I wasn’t born with his eyes. The eyes Father was searching for are angular with irises downturned like they’re meant to be fixed in the skull of a bird of prey. My eyes are round and wide, more deer at the gravesite end of a hunter’s musket than the vultures that will later bury themselves in its meat. 

Mother and I live in a large wooden house which sits on a limestone slate overlooking the ocean. The shafts that make up the walls and floor of the house are a warm red-lacquered wood which seem to almost sway in the breeze like a flower dancing in the warm breath of a child. 

There are almost no walls in my house. Rice paper screens hand painted with images of underwater scenes and ocean chimeras could collapse and reveal large open spaces filled with leaves and flowers. I assume Mother painted the screens between taking care of me and attempting to subdue the anger of Father. 

There is one painted screen that hides in a back-room neglected in the dark corners of our home. I found it one day while tracing my bare feet across the wood in search of some new animal or toy to use as my plaything. Panting, I placed my hand on the limewash walls and found a red velvet fabric tab extending out of the wall. I pulled on it tentatively, making sure I didn’t rip the old paper of the screen. It made a warm crinkling noise as it forged its way out of the wall, sun aged and yellow. 

Mother was on the screen; I would recognize her even in death or at the end of time. She was being held down by a man, not a remarkable one, with a face much like Father’s. The man was holding Mother down, forcing her arms behind her back and pinning her into the ink swatch sand. She struggled violently in this image, with her skin pulling and ripping away at joints and transforming into snakes or scorpions or eels, all gnashing teeth and venom. The man held tight. Mother stared forward with cold, dead eyes. 

I always found this painting to be Mother’s most disturbing. 

Water is sacred, my love; she tells me that water has the power to give life. And so it gave you to me. Mother always spoke in a quiet voice, almost a whisper I might fail to catch if I didn’t pay close enough attention.

Mother tells me my eyes are filled with water she collected from the sea and poured between her thighs before I was born. In the eight months before my birth, Mother walked down to the beach at midnight, leaving her shoes on the steps of the house so she could feel the wet sand in between her toes. She would take off all her clothes when she got to the water, forgetting them half buried in the sand and often taken by the waves.

She would undo her hair then, taking care as she removed the pin that she always wore in her hair, even to this day. Her hairpin was a silver spike, almost ten inches long and christened with the image of a horse whose body ended in a fishtail constricting the silver. I would always ask her about this pin as a child.

It was a gift from the ocean, Flying Fish. Just like you were. Mother calls me by the name she assigned me directly after my birth, as she always did when the conversation was important. When Father was within earshot she took care to call me John, his name. 

Your father’s name is John and so you will take after him when he’s at home, she would tell me. Men love to show to the world their trophies, but little does he know you’re my little Flying Fish. 

Mother’s hair is white, like moonlight trailing its light down the midnight black waves of her skin. The locs snake down her frame to rest gently in the small of the back, her rolled and pressed coils ending in large, loose curls. She loc’d my hair as a small child as well, but my hair is dark like my father’s, and the ends of my coils only lightly kiss my shoulders. 

Father is distant from the bulk of my birth story. He’d been away for work while my mother was in labor, she told me. My mother and I shared the same eyes, and it was our eyes that betrayed her fables. Even as a child— before I understood the concept of divorce— I could never imagine why my mother stayed with him. She was like the black waves that lashed the lonely rock our home was built on; where my mother was soft and fluid, my father was stoic and chiseled out of metal. One day my mother would wear him down. 

When I was a small child, I grabbed at my mother, my small fingers tracing a line across the slope of her stomach. She was a lean woman; her muscles swam beneath the smooth black surface of her skin. Smooth, except for this line. To my knowledge, this was the only scar she had. The cuts she’d gotten from errant fishing hooks or right hooks alike had disappeared by the time morning came. Mother lives with the scars of my birth traced along her lower abdomen, the place where she tells me her own nails had been used as a surgeon's scalpel preserved in her skin. I love this part of Mother. The puckered skin reminds me she is mine. Here, in this place, we will be together forever. 

Time is a wheel, Flying Fish. Our stories are spun and sewn on this wheel and sometimes we’re given another chance to mend the threads back together for ourselves. 

At some point in her life, Mother had another son. She called him Tight-Lipped, a phrase which meant Pain for the person burdened with the name. Pain died long before I was born; I assumed he lived up to his birthright. Mother told me he was a dreamer. She tells me it is her who made him dare to dream— she who made a man into something… more than a man.

 My mother poured her venom into Pain like sugar and honey into tea, making him yet breaking him down at the same time. He saw Mother and his father and kept that war burning inside him for the rest of his life, but eventually he too would burn out. 

And so now, Mother would shield her second son, her second shot, from the hurricane inside her own home. I was Mother’s second chance, and this time she would not let her son suffer the same pain as the last.