First published in Moss Puppy Magazine.
The island with the swimming pigs is the popular tourist spot; you feed them hot dogs on long sticks that they swear aren’t made from pork but their keratin hooves kick your calves as their snouts inhale gulps of seawater and snort it back out at you. The captain suggests, instead, a little island—it’ll only be there for an hour more, he says. We don’t know what that means but we say yes, take us there; anything so fleeting must be worth seeing, like the northern lights, the eclipse of the moon, the flight of a 17-year cicada.
The boat smacks waves like sloppy kisses until the horizon blends into ocean, aqua blue, sky blue, Eleuthera blue, and there, in the watercolor rainbow of sea and sky, arise the white sands, a stretch of glittery grain fields amidst the crystalline waters. We see what he means now, about the island disappearing; though it can’t be possible that the ocean rises so quickly to swallow it that it is visible, it certainly seems to be.
We step from the boat onto the untethered beach, as if deplaning onto a cloud unbound by land, roots, occupation, obligation, surrounded only by that Eleuthera blue. The captain, too, leaves the boat, its bow resting on sand cliff and water, digs hands deep under the floating white ground beneath us; his fingers emerge clutching a sand dollar, white on white on Eleuthera white.
Then he gestures to us to go, enjoy this flatland in the sea, waves his arm through the air at the blue surround and we frolic like children off to the carnival, plopping swimsuited butts down on sugar-white kernels of sand and digging our hands in, speckles of seashell bones wedging their way under our fingernails, but we care not about dirt or grit or wetness, our focus only on wriggling those delicate little circles of symmetrical sea biscuits up into the salty air.
A minute here in this silent Eden feels like an hour back home, back woods, back anywhere
and eventually I turn to find the boat and it is there bobbing on the waves but it seems farther as the waters have started shrinking our island to almost the size of a suburban backyard and I think, it would be okay if the captain just left us here, alone, to burrow beneath the perfect white crystals with the sand dollars and wait for the ocean to consume us.
