In Florida, my babysitter tells me that we are born to trace paths in the sand and stare as clear water fills the trenches. We are sitting with sand pressed into our armpits and stuck into our underwear. We are sitting beneath a moon that is big and white like milk. I am probably six years old and my father, sister, babysitter, and I are on a family vacation. The hotel room has two lamps on two bedside tables made of water-damaged cherry wood. It houses the kind of smell that isn’t pleasant or unpleasant but instead so muddled by so many people that it fades far into the distance. It hangs in the air.
It gets dark quicker than I expect, and the pulse of each moment feels off. In my recollection, the rhythm of time is bent, and my father has fallen asleep, mouth agape. His hair is longer than it usually is, and he will start snoring soon. My babysitter, Mariya, presses her fingers into my back and shakes my shoulders until I turn around. The sheets beneath me are cheap and plasticky, and they are clinging to my skin, but I still rub my eyelids with my knuckles and search her face. This interaction means different things to each of us. For me, it is bleary, childish trust and strange brown bruises on my shoulder blades, but for her, it is girlish and unadulterated mischief. I was a stubborn but very fragile child with many cavities, but her eyes bore deep into mine, and I swing my foal-legs shakily onto the carpet. Hand in hand with my sister, we walk toward the water like girls who heard a siren song.
I am looking down and my eyes try to adjust to the darkness so I stand very still. It looks like everything is falling into the ocean. There is gold littered everywhere and when you get too close they turn into gnarled Modelo cans. My toes press matching bruises into the sand. I notice now that the only light left is from the moon and it makes everyone's skin look almost translucent – like how newborns or my grandfather near the end of his life appear with blue veins on their eyelids. I remember holding my breath when I sat by his hospital bed and jumping when his monitors beeped but laying my hand on his anyway as he twitched and shook in the same animal way all men do on their way out. My lungs are still small and I can’t hold my breath much longer. When I breathe out that smell of cherry wood still looms in the air. I tread more lightly now. We don’t want to disturb anyone. I push my lips together. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a frail girl who eats too slowly.
Mariya brings out the kind of plastic sandcastle set that helps you build towers upon towers for the most elaborate of kings, so we carefully begin to fill the neon molds with dense sand. She has a glint in her eyes and whispers with a grin that I don’t understand yet.
“Each of you fill one of these and wait,” she urges. I am given a shovel and begin to dig. The hole grows and crumbs of sand fall back in for every scoop I eat. I push my hair back with my palm and now there is sand all over my cheeks and I bite a grain between my wiggly teeth. It screeches and I feel the sound in my nose but swallow it anyway. I’ve forgotten about the hole I raised and distractedly watch the waves grow closer like the tongues of cats. I teeter to my feet and feel very antsy all of a sudden. I’m pushing the sheets off me but my palms are sweaty and they are tangled in polyester. When I am free I can’t help but run manically to gather bucketfuls of water from the ocean. This is unbecoming, but Mariya doesn’t say anything and her smile grows as the sound of my bare feet slapping the water echoes by the hospital bed. My hands grip cheap plastic and I pour saltwater into the moat as fast as I can, but the sand laps it up so hungrily. My eyes grow wide like saucerss.
I gradually carve deeper into the sand in a wide ring. The neighborhood I was born in is shaped like the head of a regal horse and loops like a race car track. Impossible to get lost in. My Momma chose this house and planted hydrangeas all around its perimeter, but our driveway is long and I feel that they are just for me. No one else turns in. They follow the loop. My moat looks like that. It acts like that, too. I let wet sand eat up my skirt and pour thick water into many cups, spitting sand from my mouth as I move. Water drips and spills and I feel a crust of salt drying on me. Time is falling strangely now, more like chips than cards. I pour many sips of water down and when I gleefully look to see my progress, there’s nothing to behold. The water is more viscous than I remember. I pour faster and faster and am unsure how many made-up alligators are being fed or how many king’s castles are being flooded. I lick my lips and taste the salted skin around them. I’m very scared all of a sudden. A pressing weight overcomes me and I fill in the tracks with pure necessity. I keep moving the sand and filling in the horse tracks, covering any evidence of the horse’s hooves and my own footprints.
I am given a shovel and begin to dig only to quickly stop to rest a moment. When I really gawk at the water and the bubbles that are made when the sand burps and grows too full, I hold my breath again. The water disappears like sand pushing itself through the fat fingers of a six-year-old.
I feel clearer now, but only a bit. I think I disappeared that night and I think the sand began to ache and chew until it developed cavities and all the water in the world disappeared too. I haven’t talked to Mariya in a long time. She has a daughter now. Everyone who passes through that Florida hotel room tracks in sand and seawater that seeps permanently into the tables. We were just a few of many girls who went toward the water at night to watch something disappear. Not an exception, but rather the rule. I drag my feet when we return to the room and I curl into bed as Mariya dutifully weaves her fingers into my head; in return, my hair, too fine and too black, does not obey. She pulls each part into a structured knot, but salt-softened threads escape being woven into a rope of sand. She kisses the crown of my head and I feel older now. Chips are falling all around me and the waves dart over them almost immediately.