August 20, 2017 – Sunday Sunrise

The Texas coast air tastes like shrimp. Ripples lap against the seawall. Overhead the morning star glows like a 100-watt bulb against a blue-black sky. The gulls remain asleep, their red bills tucked under their wings.

I meander along the Fulton Fishing Pier to the wooden bench at its end. The horizon, tinged campfire orange, foreshadows the appearance of the sun hidden not far below it. I locate the brightest spot so I won’t miss its first flash over the water’s edge, a sight which delights me more than the fireworks finale at Fulton Oysterfest.

A fin arcs above the waves. Then another. And another: a pod of bottlenose dolphins swims up the channel to breakfast. Brown pelicans circle and dive bill-first, snaring their morning catch. Purple and pink clouds piped in gold splash across the sky. A breeze ruffles my hair as the fireball rises and dispels the last of night. I pull down my sunglasses from atop my head, finish my coffee, and return to the car to the laughter of the wakened gulls.

August 26, 2017 – Hurricane Harvey

The multi-story boat barn at Cove Harbor looks like an erector set a two-year-old stomped on in a temper tantrum. A television reporter says, “Every building in town is leaning.”

Harvey made landfall in Rockport/Fulton around ten o’clock last night as a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds of 130 mph and gusts in excess of 140 mph. The view from my friend’s window, of a wave-less northern Michigan lake, competes with screen images of disaster and devastation.

I planned to fly home today, but Houston and Corpus Christi airports are closed. There is no electricity, no water or sewer, no food. The Rockport mayor says, “DO NOT come back.”

My sister weathered 95 mph winds in an RV parked at a ranch 100 miles inland. She predicts, “There will be nothing to come back to.”

September 9, 2017 – Return home

The trees are naked, like Hiroshima’s after the bomb.

Hurricane Harvey’s eyewall, the zone of strongest winds, passed directly over Rockport/Fulton twice, as the storm approached and again as it departed. It toppled three-hundred-year-old live oaks, roots and all. It blew away highway signs and altered landmarks beyond recognition, causing me to miss the exit to my condo.

My electricity is back on today. My sister will stay with me for a couple days until power company repair crews make it to her neighborhood. Tarps cover our damage, but we have roofs. Many are living in tents.

January 1, 2018 – A New Normal

The Long Term Recovery (LTR) team tells us we are in for “a marathon, not a sprint,” complete recovery to take several years. Things will never be the same, including my regular shopping items’ aisles, relocated during H-E-B supermarket’s restoration.

Every day, a new mound of brush, building materials, ruined appliances and mattresses appear in front of an empty lot where a house or office or store used to stand. The Fulton community center and Crab ‘N’ Seafood Restaurant have been reduced to concrete slabs. Along the old highway, splintered power pole halves remain standing. Tattered tarps flap in the wind. An RV lies overturned on the shoulder.

Broken boats list in the harbor. Waves and storm surge wiped out entire spans of the Fulton Fishing Pier. Even if the bench at its end were not gone, too, I could not walk to it.

Brown pelicans roost on the pier’s skeleton. They used to perch out on the rocks away from human traffic, never on the railing like the great blue heron did. His yellow eye watching me approach, he would hold his position until he could see his presence was not to deter me from my course; and then he would fly away squawking.

February 18, 2018 – Sunday Sunrise

The Texas coast air tastes like shrimp.

The Rattlesnake Roundup is a festival that takes place in Sweetwater, Texas every year. This is all true. People collect as many rattlesnakes as they can and put them in pits. Then, they host a type of celebration around the collecting of venom, skinning, and eating of these snakes. There are vendors, taxidermists, and toys for the kids. You can buy a snake belt buckle, an armadillo beer cooler, and eat a fried snake burger all in the same place.

It tastes like spicy, dark meat chicken if you are curious. There, now you’re not curious anymore.

The truth is that there are way too many snakes in Texas and this tradition keeps their numbers under control while also collecting venom to make anti-venom. It has been going on for decades.

I was six years old when my father took me there for the first time. He had a press pass, so we were able to maneuver our way through the crowd to the main pit where the pit master greeted my dad with a warm smile. My father had photographed him for the newspaper earlier that week.

Let me take a minute to explain the pits. Remember in Indiana Jones where there’s this expansive pit covered in every type of snake imaginable? The one that made your skin crawl? Yeah, there’s that many snakes, but the pit is smaller so you can’t see the floor at all. There are several of these circular pits, like a horrible three ring circus, and in each one walks a man donning rubber pants.

This ringmaster waded through a shallow sea of venomous snakes with a smile on his face like it was a lovely spring day. He shuffled up to us, kicking snakes, and leaving a wave of angry slinkies behind him.

“Hey there! Glad you could come. This yer daughter?”

“Yep,” replied my dad.

I looked up at the man’s grizzled face as he leaned over the pit’s edge grinning at me. Before I knew what was happening, I was being lifted into the air and pulled over the pit’s walls. The pit master swung me around and settled me on his right hip. He then proceeded to wade out into the sea of snakes with me in his arms.

Let me repeat that.

He walked out into a pit of snakes with a six year old on his freaking hip, and no one stopped him. No authority figure drew his gun and threatened to fire if he didn’t release the little girl. My own father happily watched the man cart away his daughter over a writhing pit of snakes.

I looked down into the pissed off, rattling mass of scale slinkies below me and pulled my legs up as high as I could. I was determined to climb this crazy guy like a freaking tree. The old man giggled at my reaction and held me tighter. I was being dangled over an Indian Jones type pit of snakes, and he laughed at me.

“Don’t worry, honey,” he said with a laugh. “They normally can’t jump dis high.”

With that glowing bout of confidence, I looked to my dad for help. Surely, he would insist on having me back. He would be terrified seeing his little girl dangled over a pit of angry snakes, wouldn’t he? To my chagrin, he just waved at me with a goofy grin on his face, seemingly tickled pink I was the center of attention. He then pulled out his camera and started snapping shots.

“Wave to da people, honey,” said the ring master.

What else was there to do? I took a deep breath and slapped a smile on my face. Before I knew it, I was waving at the throngs of people. Everyone cheered and waved back at me. They waved at the girl being held over a pit of snakes.

Yeah, that happened. Indiana Jones ain’t got nothin’ on me.

Eventually, the pit master waded back over to the edge where my dad had finally put his camera away. Never was I so glad to feel hay covered concrete under my feet.

“Tell the nice man thank you,” said my dad, nudging me.

I grabbed Dad’s hand and managed to lead him away, but the rattlesnake roundup would not let me go so easily.

The next pit was where they “cleaned” the snakes. Men extracted them with long, metal pincers, and shoved them in plastic barrels to move them. The following description of “cleaning snakes” has been edited for the faint of heart.

The rattlesnake is placed on a pillow-like table where soothing Kenny G is playing in the background. Men apologize for being so rough-handed and compliment the snake on its rather lovely set of scales and beautiful eyes. After a long, luxurious sponge bath with bubbles, the snake obligingly removes its own skin and its head falls off out of pure happiness.

In the third and final pit, the snake’s meat is battered up, deep fried, and sold. You can have deep fried rattlesnake strips, snake on a bun, or the ever popular snake on a stick. It’s basically like a terrible corny dog. The rattlers from the snake’s tail were given out to overly curious children.

After we finished the full tour, Dad and I sat on a picnic bench eating the most disappointing corny dogs I’d ever had. I held a plastic snake toy in one hand and a rattler that still had a little blood, I mean bubble bath, on it. A smile crept across my face.

“Did you have fun?” Dad asked me.

Looking at him, I recalled our day. I got a toy, acted like Indiana Jones, and ate a snake corny dog. Sure, I had had a near death experience and watched things normally reserved for horror movies. And yes, there was probably snake blood on my shoes, but still, it had been a good day.

I couldn’t wait to go again next year.

In the dream, I find orange, blue and purple fishes caught in a tidal pool. They’re burning up in the sun, boiling in the salty soup. I dive on my belly and try to scoop up the live ones and free them in the sea, but they dart away. One by one, I watch them go belly up, their black eyes turning grey until they’re all dead.

I open my eyes, gasping, suffocating too.

It’s late August. There’s no air, no AC in my father’s house.

My best friend’s in the other bed. Her breaths are shallow. She’s not sleeping either. The streetlight filters through the sheer curtain hanging limp at the window, illuminating her silhouette, tousled mounds of black hair, dark whorls on her neck. My eyes slide over her shoulder, down the dip of her waist and up her narrow hip. I rest there on that rise.

“We gotta get outta here,” I whisper, touching my toes to the floor, then lowering my heels so there is no sound.

My bedroom is separated from my parents’ by a thin layer of dried out hardwood. On sleepover nights, they listen for creaks in the floorboards, their ceiling, and holler up, “What’re you two girls doing up there? Stop horsin’ around and go to sleep.”

Our horsin’ around requires silence.

They don’t hear us when we creep downstairs and out into the back yard.

Outside in the dew, the silvery moonlight, I touch the soft, thin skin of her wrist. “Let’s run naked races. Dare you.”

It’s the dare game. Play or be cursed. If you refuse the dare, you will live the rest of your days like Joe and Betty, my parents. And the vow. When we leave for college in a few weeks and start our real lives, we will never be them. My Father is a wall of “No’s.” Stone arms, chest, and legs, he stands wringing his rock hands, frozen in fear because disaster waits just over there, so stay here, don’t move. No. Don’t do anything. Joe’s life is a slow suffocation.

Betty bunches her apron in her fists because she’s had “Enough already” of scrubbed floors that never stay clean. Sometimes I catch her off her knees looking out windows she buffs until the glass disappears, looking for things that she can’t see. She looks for things about me, scouring my room for clues. She found a poem I ripped up and threw in the wastebasket. She had to spend hours taping the tiny, jagged shapes together so she could read it. “Is this about a girl?” She waved it in my face like it was on fire. “What does this mean?”

I didn’t have an answer so I didn’t give her one.

Sometimes, I have no words.

I stopped writing things down after that.

“Gotta take everything off,” I say.

She jerks her hand away. “That’s weird.”

I peel away my clothes. “No saying no to a dare.”

“Shit,” she tosses her shirt at me. Warm with her body’s cinnamon scent, it slides down my face, stomach, thighs and curls at my feet. I breathe her and look up. Bathed in crystalline moonlight, her body’s edges and mine blur, no skin of clothes between us. No Joe walls anymore. Nothing holding me down.

“Let’s run,” I say.

I break first, diving into the night. She’s breathing hard, her feet pounding the grass behind me.

When we get to the end of the block, I wade into the pool of light from the street lamp, raise my arms and call out, “Naked races!”

She pulls me into the shadows. “Somebody’s going to call the police.”

“Race ya back,” I say.

We swim through the dark, the deep, find each other in the watery air. We stroke in circles, whirling pools. Finally, the current brings us back, to face each other.

I want nothing between us ever again.

My hands float to her face, her open lips, her tongue on the tip of my finger. We step to each other, into each other and we are lips, soft mouths, tongues touching. Carried away, I cannot get close enough, my hands on the curve of her spine, her hips pressing into mine.

Words, unbelievable words, swim in my head. I am kissing my best friend and she loves it as much as I do.

I smile, pull away, dizzy with the power of what all this means.

“What?” she says.

I don’t have the words again.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

Finally, an answer. “Nothing,” I say. “Nothing is wrong.”

And we kiss, diving into each other over and over again. We finally stop when the first robin sings just before dawn.

I laugh, weep on this first day with our bodies together, open, free.

But she walks away and puts her clothes on.

I go to her, touch her cheek, smooth her hair back and kiss her forehead. “Say something.”

She lets me stay there, our lips close, her breath washing over my mouth. Then, she speaks. “I’m not lez. This will never ever happen again.”

I watch her walk up the backyard, into the house.

Left naked in a sea of grass, I watch her walk up the backyard, into the house and the answers come.

I don’t breathe air and she does. She can’t stay because I’m not horsin’ around.

Enough already.

I will not live slowly dying, boiling away, waiting for some air breather to save me, to change me.

All those times I pretended, it wasn’t my fault, my technique or the wrong guy. All those hims weren’t her, the one who can’t love me back.

But I am an exotic, emerald, cerulean and sapphire fish. Never ever again will I choke my gills shut in a strangle hold so nobody sees my scarlet, half-moon openings that keep me alive.

My fins writhing like silken veils, I dive into a vast and lovely deep.