flashquake — Debi Orton's Editor's Pick

WEIGHT
by Emmett Stinson

What I appreciated most about this story was the sensuousness of the detail, the apt way water is used as a metaphor for memory, and the lushness of the prose.

Clarence dips his hand past the dinghy's gunwale and retracted fingers brush the wet across his forehead. Done now, he doesn't row but lets the boat drift along in the moonlight of the Miles River, gliding silently along the uneven stillness of the rippling body. She's gone, he thinks. She's really gone. The breeze blows across his dampened brow in a chill of evaporation.

It is night, but it is not cool.

The sea nettles with their icy sting won't infest the Bay and its tributaries for another month yet, so his fingers search again for the cool embrace of water. He watches his hand descend into the water, break its surface, and feels the water rise above his hand. Submerged, his fingers close and open trying to grasp the cool and wet beneath the surface but grip nothing. Is he feeling for solace, for a comfort just out of reach? No, not now. Now, he is thinking of Archimedes. His famous inspiration in the bathtub. What water can tell you about a body. How the water caresses every inch of a thing pushed beneath it, embraces it more completely than the clumsy encircling of our arms and legs ever can. How the water knows so completely, so intimately the thing it displaces.

The water is our memory, he thinks, because nothing is buried in the water that doesn't change it, too. This is what Archimedes saw, that when you pour something in, it rises. That there is a disturbance that breaks the stillness momentarily and echoes away into ripples that even now bend the moonlight on the Miles into a sublunary travesty of that heavenly body floating above, ideal and unreachable in its hovering fullness of night sky.

Because there is a displacement to memory, too, he thinks, because something in the past happens — it has happened, it already was, and it can't not be what it was, so to bury that too is — you can't. Because the past moves something in us. We can bury it somewhere, but then we are changed. And the force of this breach echoes out too, bodily, and we feel its weight in the fluttering of our ventricles.

Clarence's fingers are trembling. The air is hot, but water is cool.

How could she have — not with him. How could … she's gone. There is nothing to feel now. About her or her absence. Only the weight. As she sinks into the depths of his memory, he feels the weight of her body added to his. This is all there is left to feel, this weight that pulls him, sinks him down like a corpse with cinderblocks tied to its feet descending ever further into the depths of the Miles, pushing the water infinitesimally past the brink. Now she is another displaced thing that lies below the surface of what we remember. Of what we want to remember.

He is done now. He has finished what he had to. He takes his hand from the water, brushing it again past his forehead and hoping to feel, momentarily, the cool rush of absolution, as he reaches for the oars that will drive him inexorably toward rest.

Copyright 2003 by Emmett Stinson

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