Backyard Sea by Tara Isabel Zambrano

Six months after her husband had died, she saw her backyard littered with seashells, fish skeletons. It was a grey morning, and a starfish was stuck on her bedroom window, its little tube feet moving on the glass. She was unsure about stepping into the cluttered grass. There was something about the sea and its residue that sometimes made her nervous. Perhaps it was from the time when she saw a man’s body washed to the shore. His burial-mound shaped abdomen, chewed limbs, his sight routed directly to the horizon. For months, that image strained her teenage sleep with the drumbeat of his tongue calling for help.

She picked up a conch shell, turned it around. Sand poured on her hand.

“What the hell,” she whispered.

By the time she was done with cleaning a fourth of her yard, clouds knotted and came down as rain, their unraveling steady as heartbeat, slapping the roofs, puddling the yard—mussel shells luminescent in them.

That night, her ear pressed to the pillow, she heard the sea. It was still dark when she woke up. Her flashlight danced on waves hitting the concrete patio. She stood there believing she was dreaming.

Come morning, she dipped her right leg where her lawn used to be. The water was up to the hill of her knee when she felt the grass tickling her heel. She ran inside and called her husband’s work number.

“Hello,” a man answered.

“Sorry, I have the wrong number.”

The admin must have cleared the greeting in her husband’s voice and all the messages she’d left in the last six months. How after his funeral she slept with all his pictures arranged in an outline of his body, or how she didn’t see any fate lines on her palms for an entire day and thought she was grieving him in her afterlife. She always ended the calls saying she was fine.

At night she was outside again, watching the sky reflected in the water. The sparkling vacuum of stars looked like pathways to other realities, her face in the center of them. A soft voice in her head asked her to step into the water. She resisted even though she had swimming lessons as a kid.

The next day she got a diving suit and watched YouTube videos of divers. In the beginning, she felt claustrophobic with all the gear. The waves cuddled her as she flapped her legs—past the flounders, and clams, she identified from watching The Discovery Channel. A starfish or a starfish shaped loneliness cut from a cloudy cloth with pink undertones, drifted, probably the one from her window.

The next morning, she went back to the water and then the next day. The backyard sea got deeper with every visit: new wormholes of water with turtles and baby sharks, a galaxy of fish with antlers and bulbs inside their mouths, eels that knifed the water before diving. Swimming with them for several weeks, she felt comfortable breathing on her own, without the gear. She raced back and forth with a sea snake with black and blue bands that curled around her ankle when she rested. Henry, she called him, and it wasn’t her husband’s name but the first word that popped into her head when she saw the serpent—his mouth like an old man who had lost all his fangs, but was agile, curious as a baby.

The backyard sea took over her home. The plaster flaked, the fist of walls dissolved in the doorless depths. Her laptop was swallowed by a baby whale and its abdomen lit up with screen savers despite its blubber. One of her husband’s pictures drifted down, pinned to a seaweed, swaying like a flag, the glossy paper—a beacon. Occasionally, she swallowed something crunchy. In the evenings, she floated, Henry stitched to her spine, listening to an orchestra of seagulls and clacking crab claws. Sometimes she heard the cicadas beating their wings, and she imagined a string of their insatiable husks under a tree—its roots touching the earth’s core where corpses melted and molded into something different.

During the days, she lay asleep on the sea floor—seaweed in her hair, coral braided around her limbs, Henry wrapped around her torso, tight enough for an embrace. At night, they lay on their sides, his mouth on her nipple, and in the soupy warmth of the dark, they slept and slept. Whenever she woke up in panic seeing a snake on her breast, she pulled him away and he swam back to her like a lover she wanted her husband to be or a child she never had or just a bad, dreadful habit.

When the sea got violent, she stayed at the bottom watching her husband’s photo, now a shred stuck in the weed, until it broke free. Weakly, she swam toward it as the piece of paper first became a dot and then disappeared. A bath sponge brushed her salt-stiff arm exposing part of her skin, making her miss the valley of sunflowers offering their necks to the wind, their pulsing city of yellow enveloping her, the scent of peaches wreathed on the stem of her fingers, and she knew she wasn’t wrecked completely. The sea had been a mirror, duplicating, multiplying her grief, unless she broke the glass. She scrubbed her body harder and later curled up like a prehistoric animal, finally given its light and name, surrounded by the braille of deposits around her. Someday, she would remember this hole of mourning as home.

She kissed Henry. The animal felt cold, stiff between her palms, slipping like a strand of hair sucked by the shower drain. As the sea slowly receded, she climbed toward the surface, chanting her name—silver crescents of her breath rising from the womb of darkness, shaped around her like a sparkling dress.

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TARA ISABEL ZAMBRANO — Tara is a South Asian writer and the author of a short-story collection, Ruined a Little When We are Born, by DZANC Books upcoming in Fall 2024. Her work has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, Tin House Online and other venues. She lives in Texas. 

Art by OCH GONZALEZ — Och’s work has appeared in Brevity Journal, Panorama Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Lunch Ticket, Complete Sentence Lit, and Santelmo Journal, among others. Her essays have also been included in the literary anthologies in The Practice of Creative Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. You can find her art at och_gonzalez.