by Mark Sabourin
She called to him. “Too far,” he heard, “Larry, come back.” Ahead, the sea wrinkled beneath the midmorning sun. Released from the current’s insistent tug, he swam a languid breast stroke. Ahead, a retreating cruise ship bobbed and shrank toward a distant horizon, a thousand kilometres of open sea, then Cuba.
A dozen years ago they’d both ignored the signs, “Danger,” “Strong currents.” They were drunk. They’d picked their way over the rocks to the water’s edge and smoked a joint. Then, they’d stripped and pushed through the heaving surf to the point where the sea’s flow and ebb met on equal terms, one pulling them back to shore, the other urging them out to sea. They’d hung there as if the currents should decide.
This time, they’d padded along a sandy patch into water no more than knee deep, swinging their son between them like a pendulum, and Larry stared out to the pinnacle where the waves broke and the cove opened up to the sea. “This is far enough,” she’d said. Jeremy laughed as his legs swung through the surf, and they laughed with him. They swung him higher and higher, till he cried out when his foot struck a rock. They retreated to shore and examined the scrape on his instep, the two of them.
“Mommy, I want to go back,” Jeremy sobbed.
She took him in her arms. Larry looked past them at Rastas, the Bob Marley bar. A half dozen hurricanes must have blown through, and still it stood exactly as he remembered it.
“Back where?” Larry asked. “The water? The hotel? Home?”
“Larry!” Her voice called again over the water. Fainter. Shrill.
He filled his lungs, dropped his head and dove. He kicked and pushed and was swallowed up by the grey ocean. He kicked hard and felt the fire rise in his lungs until he hung, suspended, neither rising nor falling. He hung still as a moment, surrounded by a fog of water. East, west, forward, back – he had no reference point, no clear direction, so turned to the ocean floor. He looked for rocks that marked a rise in the seabed, and sand that marked its fall.
Mark Sabourin took a 30-year hiatus from fiction writing to earn a living writing as a business writer. With that taken care of, he's back. His "The Law of Gravity" appeared in The Antigonish Review, #99. He is hard at work on a novel.
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