James Sulzbach • Cinna Calliope Vassalos (bathyal) wrote in marluna,
OPEN: To Anyone!
When they arrive on Saturday afternoon, both James and her two-year-old, Elisa, are fresh with sunshine on their skin and salt drying in their hair. The latter of which has only begun to frizz beneath James' wide-brimmed hat, and has become in Elisa's dark brown curls a warm thicket under her miniature straw hat.
Though Elisa has been changed from her child's wet suit into an airy summer dress (with a watermelon print on the skirt), and James herself has returned to her ice blue tank top and pale, linen shirtsleeves. She's tired. They both are. Her body aches. But it's a familiar sort of ache, the warm, pleasant sort of tired one gets from swimming and a little too much sun. She can still feel the humming in her muscles, still hear the muted drone of passing boats on the water, the bubbles in her ears, all the snapping, crunching, grinding, clicking, popping, scraping of a vast underwater world alive and expanding infinitely into deeper and deeper blue around them.
She does wonder—often—what Elisa might be feeling after a swim in the shallows, what she might still hear in her child's mind. It must be a shock—it's always a shock to James—when they leave the water and the snorkels behind, and reenter the world of human beings. All this noise: the screeching of other children, the metallic sounds of the rides, the laughter, the banging of cooks at work, of money being exchanged, of cars and bikes passing by, of people and animals and birds and television and music and the wind...
She is lost in it again, when the sound of Elisa's voice calls her back, and James blinks, looking up and across the crowd. She draws her hat back to hang from a strap at her neck. "The Ferris Wheel?" The woman narrows her eyes, damp hair clinging to her neck and tickling her lips in a breeze. "Do you think you're tall enough, perledie?" She shrugs, glancing around again at whatever else the fair might have to offer. "Let's see if there's anything a little more...oh, I don't know, a little more sea-level, maybe?"