A Guide to Being Born: Stories Read Free

A-line, some see a cotton sheath belted at the waist, some see an evening dress flicker out the door and into a waiting car. They are quiet in their rememberings.
    “Who is there when I die?” someone asks, and they all nod to say yes, they wonder that too. Alice clears her throat and begins, confident.
    “Your children are there,” she tells them. “All of them. Three of your grandchildren too. They all have their hands on your body. You can feel them letting go of warmth. It doesn’t stop at the skin or at the bone—nothing can stop it. They are singing ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.’
Outside the window you can see a lake and a Ferris wheel on the edge. It is not raining outside but it looks like it might.”
    The grandmothers have wet eyes. They are all picturing themselves lying there with many pairs of hands covering them, more hands than possible, their bodies hidden. It is just the backs of hands, familiar and radiating and with very faint pulses. In their minds, the grandmothers dissolve under those palms. They go gaseous. It is no longer necessary to maintain any particular shapes.
    Alice sits surrounded by the rattle of their collective breathing. These lungs are not noiseless machines anymore. In this close circle they are trading matter; molecules of one go straight into the tubes of another. Alice thinks of the ocean they are floating on, waves rolling out over the miles. And in those waves, fish in schools so large they turn the ocean silver.
    “We are out at sea,” she says. “We should not go to bed. We should go fishing.” The faces in the dim firelight are uncertain. “We are floating on top of a lot of creatures. Let’s see what we catch,” she tries to explain.
    “We don’t have any poles,” a voice counters.
    “We can make some,” Alice responds. “We have no idea what might be down there!” Her voice is high and excited.
    No one wants to be left alone, so they pull their blankets tighter, though it isn’t cold. The women set to work unraveling strings from the salt-heavy ropes coiled like great snakes on deck. They isolate one string at a time and then tie them around the necks of some of the baseball bats. The grandmothers disperse along the railing and drop their very long lines. The lines have no hooks and no bait. Those lines on the port side, where the wind is coming from, are pasted to the hull like clinging lizards. Those lines on starboard blow out so that, all together, the row of them looks like the rib cage of a whale.
    The women themselves are nearly invisible but for some moonlit glowings of hair—fuzzy little white islands in the dark. The sound of the overhead ring of gulls is mostly wing noise and an occasional vocal cry.
    In the underneath, in that syrupy dark, the creatures they are trying to catch do not notice the tips of the hopeful strings. Jellies jet themselves along, not going anywhere, just moving for the sake of moving. Any fishes who can glow, glow. Some have patterns of light on their spines. Fake eyes look like real eyes for the purpose of being left alone. Sharks separate the water like curtains, currents flowing off their bared teeth.
    There is always the chance of a giant squid and the great likelihood of regular squid. The octopus must not need, in the dark hours, to dispense their ink. The ink stays churning inside the cool gut of the creature, all eight arms reaching and twisting and gathering. Miniature fish congregate and suck at the bodies of bigger fish, eating the growing algae. Turtles swim the length of entire oceans in order to lay their eggs on the beach where they were born.
    The ship sloshes and the grandmothers sway. They keep their lines steady, most balancing the tiny baseball bats on their laps. They hum. Their voices are crackly and uneven. Some go for television theme songs. Some fumble over old lullabies. They don’t mind that their melodies do not match up—it is nice to hear the humming and to do the humming, just to