She searches the foggy black water once more for a glimpse of him – the illumination from the fire lighting great patches of dark blue – but there is no sign, and there is no more time.
Desperate to surface, Mary sees no opening in the sheet of flames, doesn’t know which way to swim. Toward the beach, or into deeper water?
She makes her decision and begins to swim toward the beach, and in doing so floats higher, near the surface. Too near. She feels the heat of fire above her. Despite the burning in her lungs, she forces herself deeper. The wheel passes beneath her as she glides over it, praying she can hold her breath a few moments more.
Motionless bodies drift up toward her. Released from the clutches of the wheel, corpses in tennis shoes and T-shirts and fifty-dollar haircuts rise toward the surface, where they will burn. Mary tries to not panic, to stay level-headed, to keep swimming. She pushes through the water, over the wheel, away from the flames, toward safety. The world beneath is akin to being trapped inside a globe, the topography of hell its surface, the sunken wheel its broken core. Mary floats beneath a continent of fire. She’s running out of oxygen, her eyes search frantically… there! Open water! An amoeba-shaped clearing amidst the flames. No more than ten yards away. She pumps her arms through the water. Faster. Kicks harder. She can make it.
A heavy, rising weight bumps into her midsection, knocks her off stride. She lets out a mouthful of air at the impact, spins.
A young man. A teenager. Sixteen perhaps. His skin melted into doughy red splotches. Scalp red and flaky, the hair burned away. He floats into her. She starts to push him away.
His sealed eyes open.
Mary does scream now, and the last of her breath flees her lungs, dissolves in the water. The teenager’s lips twist in what Mary thinks of as a smile. His charred hands seize fistfuls of her red blouse. He yanks her down.
Mary kicks, chest burning, panic in full force. Her air is gone. She beats at the corpse but feels herself sinking back toward the wheel, toward the ocean bottom. The water grows more frigid. She twists one last time – hard – feels her blouse tear away.
Free!
She continues to swim, head jerking side-to-side. Where is the open water? There’s nothing but burning sea above her. She’s lost her sense of direction, cannot tell which way is the beach, which way the pier. She looks down, sees more corpses floating up, eyes open, staring at her. Swimming for her. Her long, floating hair tangles with a red-hot ember, begins to smolder and burn.
Coarse hands of peeling skin grab her heels, her arms, her hair, her flesh. She writhes and struggles, kicks and beats them with her fists.
Slowly, she weakens. Her vision tunnels. The oxygen to her brain gone for too long. It’s shutting her down. One limp hand floats upward as the wheel’s minions pull her deeper.
The diamond of her new ring dazzles bright orange. A star in the black sea.
A beacon.
A warm hand wraps around her fingers, another grips her forearm. With the last of her will, her strength, she looks up. Sees the dark shadow of a man floating above her, the flaming canopy of the ocean a dramatic backdrop to his figure. He tugs at her hand, his feet kicking, pulling her skyward. The hands of the dead reluctantly release her, unable to hold on. She is propelled through the water, feels it surging past her. Up, up, away, away.
She is limp. Helpless. Can do nothing but let herself be saved.
No more air, no more energy.
She feels icy water surge down her throat, fill her lungs. Her world begins to fade.
The surface is broken. Cool air kisses her face.
She is surprised to not feel the heat of surrounding flames.
Her body rejects the invading fluid. She vomits out a lungful of saltwater, coughs and hacks, releases everything inside her. Sucks the air in deeply. Greedily. The oxygen restores her body, clears her mind. She knuckles at her eyes, wipes drool from her lips, and looks around feverishly…
… and sees nothing but sea.
She turns, looks another way. Then another. There is nothing but vast, flat black water in every direction. No land. No pier. No people. Mary is confused by the sudden, vacuous quiet. There are no sounds on the air – no riotous flames, no screams. Nothing but the soft lapping of the endless black sea.
Her rescuer floats a few feet away, motionless, his face turned away from her, as if studying the vacant horizon. She stares at the back of his head. Hair matted to a skull. Bare shoulders licked by the water’s gently rippled surface.
“Rob?” she says, surprised at how flat her voice sounds. How dead.
She looks skyward, expecting to see the familiar heavy blanket of night. Distant stars. A hazy moon.
But Mary sees only a flat pale sky, white as bone. Below that, an infinite horizon.
She starts to speak again, when her savior turns to face her.
SODA JERK
ELLIE LOOKED DOWN from her bedroom window and watched the yellow moving van pull out of their new driveway, into the street, and disappear behind a large shaggy tree that craned upward from their front yard toward blue so bright and clear that the clouds were nothing more than bursts from far-off cannons, small puffs of smoke crawling along the surface. The sky was so perfect it seemed creation itself was smiling down on her – her new home, her new life. She looked into that vast blue and wanted to smile back, feel the joy it offered, but found she could not. Perhaps it was too blue, she thought. Too expansive, too true. The sky was a lie, after all, a shiny trapdoor that hid the whole universe behind its fragile, curved shell. She drew a humped line on the thin glass of the window to match the shape of her frown, brushed her fingers along the lace curtains hung prior to her arrival, and turned away.
She sat down heavily on the bare mattress of her bed and stared at the neat stacks of boxes that held all her worldly goods. She eyeballed the furniture placed haphazardly around the room, moved them piece-by-piece in her mind to different parts of the space. Nothing seemed to fit just right, and a knot of frustration tightened inside her. She smoothed her cotton dress over her knees, calming herself. She studied the tips of her white sneakers while fighting back a swell of tears. A sixteen-year-old girl should not have to start over, she thought. She’d spent the last ten years building her life. Now that life might as well be a million miles away, on a distant planet for all the good it did her. She had loved Chicago, her school, her girlfriends, her old room…
All gone. Swept away like dust.
“Ellie Miles, you are the unluckiest girl in the whole, wide world,” she said, the words drifting to the floor like dead autumn leaves.
Downstairs, someone knocked at the front door.
Momentarily distracted from her self-pity, she ran back to the window and looked down, expecting to see a wide-assed neighbor holding a Bundt cake, or the local pastor, bible tucked under one elbow, ready to welcome new sheep to his venerated flock. She put her palms to the frame, lifted her heels to stand on tiptoes, strained to see who would visit them on the very day, near the very hour, of their arrival.
A sun-kissed, shimmering cherry-red Chrysler ragtop sat in the driveway, but the jutted roof blocked her view of both the porch and the stranger standing upon it. With a low growl of frustration, she ran to the bedroom door and pushed her ear against it, listening as her mother crossed the floor below to answer, her clipped, subterranean steps echoing off the walls of the starkly-furnished home.
The front door opened and she heard excited voices. A young man’s voice by the sound, and her mother’s high-pitched fake laugh, the one she used at cocktail parties and while on the phone with old friends. Ellie slipped out of the bedroom and moved deftly to the top of the stairs, looking down at slanted squares of bare white walls and polished wood floors. She leaned over the railing, saw the back of her mother’s calves and a pair of black sneakers pointed forward, then moving.
The door closed and Ellie pulled away from the railing, out of sight, inexplicably held her breath.
“Ellie!” her mother called, her voice bouncing off the bare floors and walls.
“Yes?” she replied flatly, her porcelain-skinned hands resting on the bannister, her chin lifted regally in anticipation of being introduced.
“Can you come down please?”
As no faces appeared beneath her to look up and notice her perfect positioning, Ellie blew out a breath and walked down the stairs, stopping just short of the bottom to maintain superiority of height.
She saw the lithe frame of her mother, dolled up in a white dress with light pink polka-dots, her blond hair pulled back from porcelain features. Beside her stood a tall, skinny boy. He smiled down at her mother with stunning white teeth; his high, tanned cheek-bones shone like polished brass. He had a bold pompadour of slicked black hair, glistening like a black ocean wave atop a broad forehead.
Ellie coughed lightly, announcing herself. She felt color rise to her cheeks when the boy’s eyes met hers. They were of the brightest blue, piercingly so, like the sky above her new town. Blue eyes were her favorite.
“How do you do?” she asked politely, staying on the stairs for now.
