Puddle

        I saw the tips of your fingertips in a puddle that I had been looking at for some time. Having no real interest in dirtying my own hands I simply watched yours in the water. Soon I was knotting my digits passionately, reddening the skin in the five pressed areas of the palm. I wondered if it were possible for them to feel lonely just as fingers, just as hands, without my heart and my head knowing. I ignored my own advice and plunged my arms into the shallow water. Inside the puddle I searched for your hand and then my body was pulled down into the sea.
         Once I was underwater I could not find you or your fingertips. There are black clouds underwater in some of the more dangerous parts of the ocean. These are remnants of angered, exploding squids. Knowing I was in an uncertain part of the Pacific I attempted to surface to the top of the water and to hopefully find land. The water seemed endless and my fright was great. I was not running out of air, however, and I swam calmly and urgently to the top. In a panic I found that I could not surface due to a hurricane commencing above. I decided to stay underwater until its passing.
         I looked down at the fingers that so naively searched for yours and then at the pinkish tentacles that had replaced them. I felt that water was all inside of my body, the cold ocean water now no different than myself. I was all nervous systems and no heart, which added to my distress. How could I have changed from a lonely human to a lonely jellyfish so swiftly? I drifted once more toward the surface, pink and ballooning with water, my long stinging arms floating about me. Suspended in the sea above me were parts of houses and roofs blown scatter by the monster storm. About the wreckage I saw your fingertips, those hands that I so desperately had to hold. You were floating on a tree branch, lithe and tangled and I spun closer and closer to your weakened body and observed you there, struggling for life. In an instant of uncontrollable desire I wrapped my pink oceanic lesions about your hand. You jerked and moaned in pain and I deflated and sunk to the bottom of the deepest coldest depths.

by mindy roth