Breadcrumb #626

ERIN DORNEY

Each time I add a shell to my pocket, another disappears. Bright pink and tiny as newborn nails crumbling to dust between my fingers. The sliding glass doors in the lobby double onto themselves and I study it—they’re my mentors now. On all four an etched wave multiplies, never quite aligned but almost. 

The waves are there to protect people, children, birds—all who mistake glass for mirror, search for glimpses of their next selves. The waves double and undouble, the girls follow each other around the trickling fountain. 

Overhead the chandelier sways like a slow zoom. I haven’t yet told anyone how I can make things larger and smaller with my eyes. How I can shrink a woman down to crib-sized and fatten a man until he bursts. How scale changes meaning in a heartbeat, the amount of time it takes for the next wave to come once you’ve already heard the first crashing. 

“How I can shrink a woman down to crib-sized and fatten a man until he bursts.”

The waves, I tell the child hiding behind the sticky wicker chair next to the Birds of Paradise in stinky water—the waves are the only ones who touch my other body, the only ones who know it’s there, a small shell crumbling in a clenching and unclenching hand, a girl knee-deep in the mosaic fountain. 

The child turns, runs, topples the “Check Out” sign, and falls. We watch the mother scream. The doors open again and again, an insatiable mouth—sometimes at the last minute, sometimes when no one is around at all. A wave is always there just in time, ready to wrap itself around you. The steady pressure of water, open arms.

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