It was the day she’d gone to the beach with Rob she was bitten, on that third date. It had to be. She hadn’t thought she liked him enough for a third date, they’d met online, the first dinner because she had nothing better to do, then he had tickets to that sold-out show. That was all, but then, she had wanted to go to the beach. She’d always loved the beach. And he was free.
It was a hot day, the flashes off the water blinding, seeming to fill the air with fumes of sunlight. Children were running and splashing, screaming at each other in the shallows over an orange plastic shovel; the father sitting at a distance, tan and tired in his big swim trunks. Rob was saying something, she was staring out along the horizon, her ears full of seagulls cawing and crying, her forehead starting to get that tight headachy feeling which was coming over her so frequently lately, which would in time squeeze all the joy out of a day like juice from a lemon. She tried to think of good things—the breeze in her hair, the blueness of the water dancing—but the harder she tried to enjoy herself, the tighter the invisible headband grew. She was too young to develop a disorder. Maybe she was working too much. She took a deep breath and flexed her toes in the hot sand, and that made her feel slightly better, and then out of the corner of her eye she saw in a cloud of sun some little black specks swarming around. She felt something on her arm. “There’s a paddleboat out there,” said Rob, the first words all day she’d heard clearly enough to understand, and she looked down at herself and saw a spot of blood.
One thing she was not going to be—she had decided as soon as she got home—was tacky about it; she was not going to end up on the news. She’d seen other bitten people on TV, expostulating or singing in their homemade t-shirts and Verdant Life hats, family members scrounged up from somewhere to camera-weep. She did not think anyone was going to miss her much, but dutifully texted a short list of friends. She gave notice at work—just two weeks, no need to drag things out—and asked Katie not to throw a leaving party; she didn’t want the looks of pity/judgment, cast like bright searchlights over a sugar-white cake; she wanted to steal quietly away into the dark. She saved her parents for last, and told them over coffee and sweet buns, in the cafe they always liked with the light brown walls, by the seafront whose roaring now made her mother shudder and hunch over her mug with brave, tremulous eyes. “We’re happy if you are,” said her father, but it wasn’t happiness she felt exactly, more of a lack of fear, a slackening of a rope that had been holding her, strangling her slowly, and now everything was cut away into a vast openness. She boxed her things and gave what she could to Goodwill. She closed accounts and turned in keys. She took Seeley to the pound, and that was hard, but coming out of the smelly building she tasted brine and heard conch shells groaning in her ears, her arm throbbed and her body longed for wetness. To how many others was it happening this very day, at this very moment, walking past her on the street, tossing and turning behind the windows overhead, dreaming of lakes and forests and rivers, wild places that swarmed and seeded and bit down deep into soft flesh, fresh, oh fresh bodies dissolving and emerging like salt? On the last day she undressed and walked the beach under a looming blackness, hours before dawn, sat cross-legged close to the surf and looked out at the sky and waited for the change to come.
Evelyn Pae is an aspiring naturalist and writer currently based in Syracuse, New York.
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