Survivors

A Short Story

The Distracted Writer is a reader supported newsletter about motherhood, storytelling, and the things that move our souls. The following is an original piece of short fiction.

Photo by Ainars Djatlevskis on Unsplash

The stone was nestled among the burnished, earth-toned rocks shifted into place by the lapping waves. Adam pointed it out to Caylin and their daughter when he felt the mood tightening into its usual tensions. They were on their way back from a hike, picking their away along the shoreline. Their daughter zig-zagged against the reaching fingers of foam, stumbling along the slippery rocks, as Caylin told her over and over again to be careful.

“Zoe, look,” he called, drawing her away from the waves. Creases burrowed across the stone like the skin on the fold of an elbow, or the coarse wrinkles around an elephant’s eye. Zoe laughed at his comparison, her giggle like the babble of the waves that slipped over and between the stones. She bent down, squatting, to inspect it, and then tried to lift the oval shape, as big as a loaf of bread.

“Zoe, don’t,” Caylin sighed. “You’ll hurt yourself.” But Zoe was already holding it over her head, triumphantly, like she’d lifted a monument. She took two shaky steps, her feet and too-big rain boots fumbling over the uneven path, and Caylin saved her from falling with a tight grip around her arm.

“I wanna see how big a splash it’ll make!” Zoe said, even as she lost hold of the stone. It toppled, almost landing on Caylin’s foot. His wife looked at him, five years of exhaustion in her glazed expression.

Zoe began to whine as Caylin told her they needed to head back, that it was going to rain, that it was time to get dinner. She promised chicken goujons and fries, but Zoe, in her denied exhaustion, plopped her butt on the stone and began to cry-talk about wanting to watch for seals. Adam squatted next to her before Caylin could shoot him another pleading look.

“Do you know why this beach has rocks instead of sand like the beach back in Corpus?” he asked. She stopped crying, shook her head, and wiped snot along her raincoat sleeve. He told her that the stones would become sand, that each climb of water was pulverizing the stones into grains of sand, a slow task over years and years. Her eyes widened. How many years? Oh, hundreds, maybe thousands, he said. The moon makes the waves get bigger at night, which is why we can’t stay here. But why? she asked, and he could tell by the way she kicked at the rocks at her feet, disinterested, that she was stalling. And since he didn’t feel like giving a science lesson she wouldn’t understand or care about, he made something up, ignoring Caylin’s, “Because we said so, Zo.”

Because the ocean loves the rocks. Do you hear the way it talks to the rocks? He made a gurgling sound to imitate the loud gush and burble of the waves crashing and gliding back. She smiled when he said, in the same gurgling voice, “I love you. I love you…Do you hear it? I love you.” She nodded and imitated him, dropping her pitch, low and guttural. You see the way each wave goes between each stone? Like the water is trying to hold onto them. But the more it tries to hold on, the more it destroys. And at night, when it can’t see very well, the ocean can’t tell the difference between rocks and little girls. It will think it loves you, but it’ll break you apart just like the rocks.

“Adam,” Caylin said, calling him out of his own story with a tone he knew too well. Her eyebrows spoke of the nightmares she didn’t want to deal with tonight.

“It’s just a story.”

“Yeah, Mommy, it’s just a story,” Zoe replied.

“All right, come on, let’s go.” Caylin started to walk. She had said three times already that she’d worn the wrong shoes for this kind of terrain, and he saw now they were soaked through, the light canvas turned a dark brown from the moisture along the trail, in the air.

“I want the waves to get me!” Zoe squeaked, and she darted for the water. Adam caught her up, belly folding over his forceps as he hefted her from the ground and lifted her, squirming, onto his shoulders.

Caylin didn’t glance back at them as she plodded up the shore, over the stop line that separated the beach from the grassy dunes. Her arms cocooned her, pressed her trench coat into dents against her form as the wind picked up and began to spray the shore with flecks of foam. She stopped in a divot in the dunes, grass climbing as high as her hips, and stared away from the sea, away from Zoe and him, toward the sheep grazing languidly in the patchwork pastures along the road.

“But I wanna watch for seals,” Zoe said, but already she was more interested in twirling her fingers in his hair, in swinging her legs up and down to the rhythm of his step.

“No, we gotta go before Mom turns grumpy-pants.”

“But why?”

“She’s just worried about you getting sick in the rain.”

“But I won’t get sick. I’m big now.”

“Yes,” Adam laughed. “Getting too big.” Already, his shoulders burned with her small weight, so much heavier, it seemed, than the last time, and the time before that. Zoe was small for her age—she always would be—and yet, even at five, her size still surprised him when he thought back to the tubes and the translucent skin and the appendages like the fractals of a tree branch. Body like an egg. Back then, they’d have never imagined traveling this far with her. They could barely fathom it the day they brought her home, a sleeping lump, a single car seat in the backseat (one car seat, where there was supposed to be two). And yet here she was, their fierce and frustrating little survivor.

“Like her mama,” someone had said, he couldn’t remember who now, the first time they’d dared to bring Zoe out of the house and he’d used that word to describe her. Caylin had smiled at the other person and taken Zoe from his arms. Later, she’d told him how much she hated that word.