the ocean

she knew the ocean because she had to know it.

this is how she knew it:

she could feel the ocean with such depth and to her it was like a bowl of pudding from an anxious christmas eve that she often thought about. the bowl was big and you could stick your spoon down into the pudding for forever. when she untied the bows on the next morning she imagined babies being born and she told momma but momma cried and she did not know why.

when she grew older she saved babies from the ocean because she had since learned about purgatory.

this is how she saved them:

on the boat she directed the captain and the compass always spun because it was confused. she could always see aphrodite and the frothing mist and the waves that would travel like the fields and the fences and the snowdrift in her old backyard.

and in the ocean the storm always came and it was dark and unwholesome but she held the captain's hand and with smooth fingers sealed they made their rescue.

once she rescued a baby boy from the ocean and she imagined his name and that name was billy vilim and he was a curious mystery. she thought about billy vilim consistently and from his first cry in the spring she assembled his life's events.

she imagined how his life began in a museum filled with dinosaur bones and concluded in a trench filled with french bones. she imagined a granddaughter billy would never know, crawling out from underneath a christmas tree--drinking milk from a straw made of licorice.

(she thought about the ways he would learn about bathroom floors and archeological excavations and traffic lights.)

and as she grew older she would watch the children shout on the playground that she passed every time she walked to her friend's house--down the street. to her it was like a city where all the inhabitants wore blue and red and yellow and as she observed their play she could remember the equivocal smell of wet bark and momma's smooth fingers--sealed overtop of her passible head, catching raindrops--and momma said the raindrops came from the ocean and if you caught enough of them you could have your own ocean. when she saw the ocean in momma's hands she wondered if snowflakes came from the same place, but momma had said that they were sent from the north with the presents that floated down from the sky on parachutes on christmas eve.

and every year when it was time to stuff scarves into drawers and open umbrellas, she would look at a bag filled with reusable christmas bows in her cellar and think about a wooden fence in her backyard, and how its shadow gave life to a patch of past-due snow.