Plum Cove

By Emma Johnson Tarp:

The beach is smaller than I remember and it’s high tide and the water is so blue it stings my eyes, the back of my nose, the back of my throat and there, I see them:

Three boys climbing out on the big rock, their hands finding the same cracks, cracks they know on instinct, like breathing, from summers and summers of swimming-climbing-jumping, summers of returning here just as I return here now but not like that at all because I don’t know those cracks and it stings in my eyes and nose and throat that I don’t and look—

They pull their small, hard bodies up and out of the seaweed,

One tall and dark, too big for his trunks—

One compact, a square all-over—

One slight with a shock of blonde hair that glows against his sun-brown skin—

And they jump into the water and they don’t come back up 

Until 30 years later when they return with me for the first time and we will wade through the seaweed together, my blue-white skin on edge from it all and their skin now lined, lungs lined, with sand and sun from endless summers right here and one that never really did end at Desert Shield and they will find the cracks— cracks they know on instinct, like breathing— and they will stare at their hands like they are magical instruments then lay them on me, pulling me up to join them.

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Emma Johnson Tarp writes stories about devotion, bodies, and liminal space. She studied literature and religion at William & Mary and lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two rebel-hearted cats.