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| The Breakwater The summer I was twelve, Mickey knocked me unconscious by squeezing me in a bear hug. I had just taken his recommended thirty deep breaths and was blowing on my thumb like I was trying to inflate myself when I felt his arms wrap around my chest from behind. Then I was alone, sliding down the side of a mountain. A group of peers formed a circle around me. They stared down at where I lay with my eyes rolled upwards, jerking and twitching like a marionette whose strings had snapped. Mickey was fresh from Americus, Georgia. He was my age, but bigger — and his confidence and languid way of moving made him look bigger still. He was habitually polite. He called everyone “sir” or “ma’am” — even if they were giving him grief. His parents had divorced. He and his sister, Sheila, had just come north to Chicago to be with their mother. This was before single-parenting was the norm, before it was even acceptable. Sheila was fourteen, soft and mature, a blond southern peach. It was she who had taught Mickey the hyperventilation trick. After I had recovered and shaken off my confusion and feelings of exposure, Sheila invited me to squeeze her while she passed out. She didn’t actually need my help. Later, sitting beside me on my porch steps, she showed me how she could knock herself out just by bearing down on the last of only ten good breaths. Trembling, she slumped against me. Then she did it again. And again. “How can you do it so much?” I asked half way into her next gasping and blowing set. She held up a hand to forestall my question and rhythmically continued. She squeaked like a mouse when she compressed her last breath. Then her arm dropped heavily onto my leg. Her head nodded forward, eyes fluttering. Again she fell against me. I didn’t mind. “For a moment, when I’m coming to, I think I’m home in Georgia,” she told me. Then she began to breathe again. I fell in love with Sheila the way only one for whom sexuality is still a complete mystery can. Percy pulled up in his shark-finned Impala, interrupting Sheila’s quivering southern sojourns. Percy had dropped out of high school and was rumored to carry a switchblade. “Get in,” he said to her, ignoring Mickey and me. “We’re going to Lee Street Beach. Something big is about to happen.” We got up and peered into the car. It was packed with teenagers. A girl in a long white dress was pressed in beside Percy on the front bench seat. She sat erect and composed with her hands folded neatly in her lap, gazing far ahead as if into the future. She was the only one not smoking. “Get in,” repeated Percy. “Sit on somebody’s lap.” “Y’all go on ahead,” answered Sheila with her sweet drawl. “We’ll catch up to you.” Lee Street Beach was about a quarter mile long, situated between an old cement pier and a long steel breakwater. Separated from sidewalk traffic by orange slat construction fencing, it consisted of a scrubby swath of crabgrass above a broader stretch of sand that always smelled of seaweed and dead fish. Percy’s group had congregated on some large rocks at the base of the breakwater. They had a bottle stashed in the rocks. We watched them take turns drinking from it. Mickey went to see what was happening. I hung back so as not to have to share in any rebuffs, and Sheila stayed with me. But Mickey was not rebuffed. The boy he approached, a tall, pale kid with greasy black hair and a pack of cigarettes wound up in the sleeve of his T-shirt, actually placed an arm around his shoulders. He pointed to where the girl in the white dress had begun to shuffle out onto the narrow breakwater. A breeze off the lake caused her dress to billow out behind her like a bride’s train. I watched the girl’s slow progress. She stared down at her feet which she never lifted, inching along with one foot leading and the other following. Even though the breakwater was over ten inches wide and only about eight feet high, she had her arms out like she was on a tightrope. I knew how she felt. I had fished off of the breakwater once when the perch weren’t biting from the pier — but not for long. The further out I went, the higher and narrower it had seemed. I saw Mickey take a polite slug from the bottle before discreetly stashing it back between the rocks, feeling envious at his easy inclusion. Then he headed back to where we waited. “That girl is aiming to kill herself,” he said when he returned. “She is going to drown herself.” I could smell the communal liquor on his breath. “She already tried to cut herself. But it didn’t work.” “Why?” I asked. Mickey answered quickly, verbatim. “Because she is tired of living. Because she has problems she can’t fix.” “No,” I said. “I mean, why didn’t cutting herself work?” “It just didn’t,” he replied. “When her wrists stopped bleeding, she was still alive. Must be she didn’t cut deep enough. Hurt enough though.” I couldn’t tell how much of this was hearsay and how much was his ad-libbing. “So now she’s going to throw herself in the water.” “No she won’t,” said Sheila quietly, almost to herself, looking at the sidewalk. As though having overheard, the girl on the breakwater stopped. She had to sit down to turn around. When she stood up, the back of her dress was stained with rust. Her trip back looked easier. Mickey rushed off for an update. “She didn’t know she was scared of drowning,” he reported when he had returned. “Now they’re all heading downtown. She’s going to throw herself from the parking garage.” “No she won’t,” said Sheila, shaking her head, taking my hand as if to console me. “She won’t do any such thing.” “I got to show Chris here something,” said Mickey after the suicide party had piled back into Percy’s old Impala and driven off in search of high places. “But it’s a secret. It’s real private.” Sheila let go of my hand. “I don’t mind walking alone,” she said. “Y’all enjoy your little secret.” Even though Mickey was my best friend, I would have much rather gone with Sheila and let her keep holding my hand. But there is etiquette to growing up, and so we parted. Sheila headed off in the direction of the breakwater. Mickey leaned on the slat fence, bending it down so I could climb over onto the crabgrass above the beach. Then he followed me. There was a couple necking on a blanket to our left and a family cooking hotdogs on a public barbeque to our right. Neither paid us any attention. Mickey took a small worn brown paper bag out of his pocket. Out of this he took a half rolled-up tube of model airplane glue. I could smell the glue even before he twisted off the cap and squirted some in the bag. “This is what you got to do,” he told me placing his mouth in the mouth of the bag. The bag snapped flat shut when he inhaled. “See,” he exhaled into it. The bag inflated open with a crackling pop. He did it again. “See.” I grabbed for it. But he twisted away and fell down laughing. “You’ll get your chance,” he said sitting, leaning up against the fence, waving the bag like a crinkled paper balloon. “Just you wait.” When he put his mouth to it again, I turned away. It took me a second to realize I was looking for Sheila. Then I saw her. She was walking on the breakwater. Even though she was already most of way out, there was no apprehension in her gait. She walked lazily, easily, with her head up, gazing out beyond where the sky meets the water, even beyond the far away smokestacks of Gary, Indiana. Her arms swung loosely at her sides. I ran after her. On the breakwater I slowed to a jog. The breeze had seemed to pick up. Chicago is the windy city. I did not look down. I had almost reached her. I was close enough that I could see her shoulders rise and fall and her ribcage expand and contract with each deep breath. She stood with her back to me, her toes hanging over the end. Jarring vibrations up through my feet grew stronger. Then footsteps pounded up behind me. I don’t know how Mickey managed to sprint past me on that slender steel path. I felt him grab my shoulders as if to throw me off. Then he was in front of me, rushing to his sister. And I was still standing. He stopped when he was close enough to touch her. But he did not touch her. I gaped at him as he swayed against the horizon. He still held the glue sack in his hand. “Sheila!” he cried above the wind. “Don’t you dare breathe! Do you hear me? Don’t you dare take another breath!” I saw her glance back at the brown bag in his hand. “And what about you little brother? Do you want to stop breathing too?” Without taking his eyes off her, Mickey crumpled up the bag and threw it. The wind caught it and battered it along one corrugated side of the breakwater before depositing it in the lake. A seagull swooped from the sky to claim it, then changed its mind and let it sink. I watched Sheila gently exhale. “I came out here to get some air,” she said, “and to be alone.” With that we turned around and headed home, me leading. |
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| Chris Miller |
| Chris’s General Arts degree includes a minor in Psychology but no lit courses. His proudest writing achievement’s selling a 4000 word sci-fi into the Cosmos slot Joe Haldeman (of "The Forever War") filled the year before. He’s also proud of having been banned from a select UK "professional writer's" workshop for posting ‘porn’; placing twice in and receiving an Amazon Gift Certificate from normally non-paying Libbon; short-listing in Chizine's 2006 competition; receiving a personal angry rejection from glimmertrain and a very kind one from American Scholar. |
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