Things Break

Toya poured some coffee into a giant plastic cup, because coffee mugs were too small.

After all, she managed to spread apart the hours of July 23rd like a man spreading apart the legs of a virgin just to touch something new. For Toya, a divorced paralegal and single mother of two, sunshine, a good book, and a big plastic cup of coffee were as new and daring as she could possibly get. She scooped up a copy of And This Too Shall Pass, by E. Lynn Harris, as she balanced her coffee in her right hand. Then, she edged her hips sideways through the stubborn screen door of her salt-bleached pea green beach house.

She found a pocket of sand that was free of broken shells and seaweed, free of the stench of something dead, and for once, she sank herself into the body of something without worrying about what kind of debris it would leave beneath the creases of her crisp white Capri. She sipped her coffee, letting a drop bleed onto her book that she knew she wasn't going to read anyway. Her coffee was already lukewarm from breathing its heat into the cool sea breeze the same way she once exhaled heat into the chiseled features of a man who turned out to be gay.

July 23rd is the day Travis left Toya without wiping the bank account clean, without leaving a nasty note on the bed, without saying he fell in love with another girl, and without even saying that he wasn't in love with anyone. Toya knew why she celebrated this day. She knew she needed to convince herself that she was a graceful woman who understood that sometimes, lovers don't break. Sometimes, people lie because they love the people that they aren't in love with. I don't break, she thought. I'm not broken.

She arched herself into the breeze that rolled over her from an empty horizon. She imagined herself to look like a goddess, a sleek silhouette against a bright grey backdrop. For the past six years, on this very day, she executed the same choreography of pride.

She dug her bare feet into the cool sand. She planted her cup beside her and stretched out like a starfish on the surf. Her delicate hands dove beneath, then reemerged from the soft grains of denial, and this time, she cried.

She cried because, beneath the sand, her skin felt something hard, something that must have pierced her skin. For a moment, her heart turned into glass when she reached her hands to this hard, unrelenting thing. Trembling like a lunatic, she laughed at what she held in her hands. Her arm uncoiled itself from the pit of her spine, and in her hand, she held a small lightning-whelk. This lightning-whelk was right-handed. Her boss, an avid shell collector, had taught her that all lightning-whelks were sinister, or left handed. When held from top to bottom, the opening was on the left. This shell that she found defied that law. It was queer.

She sprang upwards from her shape of a star and held this thing like a baby in her hands. A small drop of wind licked at the wound on her back and she turned to see a drop of blood sinking in the sand, and it was okay. For once, she sank herself into the body of something without worrying about what kind of debris it would leave beneath the creases of her crisp white Capri.