Part 1

Tamara’s mind drifted back into the pool of eight prescribed antipsychotics. The light sparkled and burst with colours and the black, growling shadows that usually crawled from the ground like thick, heavy cables undulating toward her had now dissipated into the white sand beneath her feet. A gentle wave washed over her toes. Her mother kneeled in the sand taking pictures of Tamara. With her head back facing the sun, Tamara smiled. She rested the back of her hand on her forehead like a dying swan.

“Elbow higher. Head back. Smile. Grace – more grace. That’s it. More! You got it. You are not old. You can still make it! Yes.”

The camera shutter gawked and spat black shadows like taser wires at Tamara and the sun had eradicated them in an instant. Protected by the sun, Tamara exhaled.

“Don’t forget the lotion. You don’t want to look like the locals.”

“Five feet tall and no neck?” she replied in Russian.

They laughed.

“I’ll edit and post tonight. We have plenty pictures to use for the next few weeks, and surely we can get the right traction. Some interesting men nibbled at your profile. Don’t worry; you are doing the work: the therapy is working, your meds are balanced, you gained back the weight, and you look quite normal. You are still quite young. It’s time to get you married and out of my house.”

“Thank you, Mama,” Tamara nodded to the cruel logic. With Mama gone, she would be left in care of strangers, her black shadows, and the state mental health system – the one that asks you to “leave a message” and calls you back ten days after your mental breakdown.

“Let’s get in the shade.”

The white, powdery sand gave way as she walked. She stared down the bright beach against the sun where the waves burst with azure, arched under the wind, broke with white peaks, and finally roared against the shore. And the wind raised a dust cloud blowing toward the serpentine string of hotels lining the shore. Tamara smiled and stared into the bursting turquoise waves that rolled toward her.

“It’s too hot. I’m going for a swim. I’ll grab us some vodka tonics on the way back.”

“Good girl. Don’t be too long. Mommy’s thirsty. And in the glass, please.”

Tamara passed a few middle-class American mothers gently splashing seawater at their toddlers. She saw the mothers’ bodies cracked like eggs, shattered like glass, parts missing. Bodies torn apart like bread or sheet music. Parts ripped away to seed families, with fat filling the voids of scar tissue, and behind their blue eyes and settled minds lay a frenzied desperation yearning to reclaim their bodies that were never to return and the selves that long had drained away. Tamara’s illness turned their bodies into black silhouettes and dread came over her and peace ruptured over the thought of motherhood. She looked away and the peace returned. Waves rolled over Tamara’s thighs, wind over her face, and sun over her shoulders. Still wearing the swimming dress over her swimsuit, she closed her eyes and walked the water toward the horizon. Fat middle-class American fathers stood waist-deep in the water, fathers to the toddlers and husbands to the torn wives on shore, some with fresh sunburn the colour of boiled crayfish, and others tanned deeply the colour of pork livers. Their eyes moved over her body like claws of impotent incubi. Their eyes scraped against her skin with a screech, slid like slobbering tongues down her salted flesh and their venomous teeth bit inside her thighs. “Boorish creatures – stop! No, you swine, no more!” her mind screamed and then her mouth screamed but the wind and the roaring waves muted her cries, and the turquoise waves rose higher and rolled in harder scraping greedily against her. She leaped through the waves with abandon and dived in, and there, suspended in raging torrents, she prayed to the Sea Goddess to scrape those eyeballs off, those shipworms, that rot away from her body. Her peace healed again.