Ballet for a Castaway
By Carrie Cogan
The jellyfish first hovered unreachable, removed as backlit clouds. As my arms wheeled closer, some sharpened to stark ovals and perfect squares. Others contained so many frills and flaps they were like tornados, or cutting-edge fashion: impossible to comprehend. I could execute a full-body swerve without breaking my stroke, but mostly I let myself collide into them. Their stinging might transmit elegance. I would drift into a room and blot it silent with my ease, my grace, my simmering iridescence.
It was so dry and dusty in that Mexican village. I wore torn castaway clothes, subsisted on scraps. I pecked my way across manure-strewn trails, hunched and panting. Some of the jellyfish had intricate lightbulb wiring. If smashed apart they would require a specialized electrician to save them. Some had circular ends that billowed and recoiled, like smoke rings refusing to launch. After watching jellyfish you could only laugh at clocks. How flat and clunky they were. How they made everyone rush, madly and loudly, away from themselves.
People who saw my yellow cap glide into a speck and vanish asked why I swam so far. But how do you confess you’ve fallen in love with jellyfish? How can you even know? I only knew that when I stepped out of the water, I felt glad for the pink ribbons on my skin, burning and humming. Their fire indicated—late into the day—that the creatures I dreamt were still there, pulsing steadily as my welts. After I left that bay for good, I only knew that the strangest things lodged in my throat. A ripped tail on a windsock, fluttering. The pastel sheen on a mud puddle. An umbrella blooming slowly open. A crystal goblet bobbing up from dirty sink water.
About the Author
Carrie Cogan lives with her sons on Salt Spring Island, BC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, AGNI, Bennington Review, Nimrod, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. She won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Prize and the Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest. Cogan is at work on her first novel, which has received support from MacDowell, Ucross, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She follows bugs.
For more from Carrie Cogan, try “Savior Invader”!
