The Ocean to Our Chests
By Patricia Fuentes Burns
We run across the burning beach to save the soles of our feet. Nearly to the water, we drop our buckets and step deliberately on cool sand to leave perfect prints that quickly fade. The air smells the same as we remember from last summer, when our fathers were home. Sugar and butter and dust and fish, each smell coming to us singularly, then all together. And the splash of waves, the cries of seagulls, the whip of the wind, the rumble of motorboats far away, you’ve never heard so much noise that isn’t noisy.
Voices break through and we look behind us to see the others. Our mothers in their long colorful dresses and straw hats. Our already tan big brothers and beautiful big sisters carrying baskets of towels and coolers filled with apples and bananas, salt and vinegar chips, hard boiled eggs, cold sodas. We have rainbow umbrellas to keep us safe from the sun when we are not in the sun and dark green camping chairs for our mothers to sit on and talk and flip through magazines and sigh.
We beg for someone to do our lotion so we can swim. But no, first they must set everything up. We need shade, our mothers say. We need to get organized. Our brothers dig deep holes for the umbrellas. Our sisters put their long wavy hair up in buns and slick on cherry lip gloss and rearrange their bikini tops and place the coolers all in a row. We help with the towels that are rough from last year’s saltwater and faded from the sun. We straighten them tugging on one end and then the other and find small warm rocks to put on each corner.
Our mothers are ready for us now and they shake pink and yellow cans making a small rattling sound. We stand with our arms out and our legs apart like superheroes. We know it’s coming but still we gasp when the icy spray hits our skin. Hold your breath, our mothers say. But the taste is already in our mouths, like kisses from grownups after they’ve had wine.
Back at the shoreline our shiny blue buckets wait, but we suddenly feel shy and don’t want to get wet, our skin so warm and the wind cooler here. We wish for our fathers’ freckled shoulders to sit on, but our fathers are on the other side of this ocean. Our hair flips back and forth, covering our eyes and sticking to our lips. We jump up with each small wave that reaches us. The ocean is loud, the wind in our ears is loud, we can hardly hear our own laughs. A wave stronger than the others grabs our feet, lifts one of our buckets and carries it away. We chase after, then swim, reaching for it together, the ocean quickly to our chests.
THE END
Author Bio: Patricia Fuentes Burns has published fiction in TriQuarterly, Quarter After Eight, Another Chicago Magazine, Jellyfish Review, and Quarterly West, among other journals. Her work has been anthologized in Grace in Darkness and Shut Down Strangers & Hot Rod Angels. She has an MFA from George Mason University and lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband and three daughters.