It was two-thirty and Tommy was not there. It was raining again. She stood in the entrance to the aquarium, before its tinted glass doors, and watched it fall. The boats bobbed in the harbor like great white birds. She breathed white clouds that faded into the air like a single plucked note. She thought maybe the bus crashed, her mother’s prediction come true. Hadn’t she predicted it? Bodies splayed like shards of glass.

Inside, the aquarium was vast and hushed. It reminded Vicky of a library. Wet rubber soles squeaked on the marble floors. Here and there were great mosaic tiles, depicting sea creatures real and mythic. A mermaid in one, Poseidon in another. An octopus, a starfish, a dolphin.

She paid for a ticket—more than she could afford, she thought—and followed a fold-out map the woman behind the ticket desk handed her. Low voices rose in hymns above the shallow tanks. One tank held hermit crabs and starfish and shells. It was long and open and you could reach into it and touch things.

A girl of about eight or so was speaking to the woman supervising the tank. The girl had glasses and red hair in an uncombed pony-tail. Her mother stood behind her, resting a freckled hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Starfish,” the girl was saying. “I know something about starfish. They regenerate their legs. They are mollusks. They are surprisingly soft to the touch. Unless they’re dead, of course.”

The woman who worked there was listening with an expression of bemused irritation. I could outdo you with my knowledge of starfish, it seemed to say. If you only knew.

The girl’s hair reminded her of the Sonora clay, which she wished she had look for before she tossed all those boxes. It was buried now in the soggy mess of cardboard and trash, probably crushed, spilled clay congealed and muddy. The trash trucks only came on Tuesdays. Someone, a neighbor, had scrawled in chalk on the brick wall, over the boxes: Ever heard of a dumpster?

She tried winking at the girl but she looked alarmed and buried her face in her mother’s stomach. She hurried on.

There was a large room with high ceilings and enormous tanks along the walls. They glowed blue and splashed the floor in a net of wavering light. In one, a diver in a dark wetsuit and an oxygen mask was cleaning the window of dark green scum. It flaked off in mossy shreds. On the rocks behind him, coral blossomed in rippled tiers. The green and yellow leaves swayed thickly. A striped fish peered at Vicky with one startled eye. The diver was almost completely upside down. A small school of silver fish darted frantically around his flippers, their scales flashing. Vicky waved to him, but he didn’t appear to see her. She could hardly see him—only his hands were bare. He was immersed in his watery world. He was concentrating. With two careful fingers he moved aside some small oblong creature that clung to the glass with stubborn insistence. Vicky waved again. For a moment, it seemed like he may have noticed. His head tilted faintly towards her, bubbles spurting from his mask like words.

 

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Ashleigh Pedersen is a third-year MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.  Thanks to a surplus of owl figurines at a local Goodwill, she recently started an owl figurine collection.  There is just something about their extremely large eyes that she finds promising, even carved in wood.