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Babies are born squalling. They kick, scream, wail at the abysses that linger between the arms passing them and faces that leave sight. They mean it to find help. To fight off the unknown. To remain.
She’ll witness it when her son is born, but Sally knows it from the minute she’s born: squalling, kicking, screaming, wailing, fighting to remain.
Her parents take her home that day. She is healthy. The neighbors bring food and cooing every evening that week, and then on every Tuesday night for a whole month after. It’s not long, barely two years, before Sally is helping her parents to return the favor. She carries the bread to Mrs. O’Brian’s wake. Pushes the wagon of nails and wood from behind while Dad pulls from the front when the Gorettis’ shed caves in after a windstorm.
Kindness isn’t a currency. It’s a symptom of community. Odd Ms Lawrence says so while Sally is helping her with her garden, all violets and carnations. Mother is inside filling a pitcher of water for plant food. Sally is just old enough, just barely five years old, to remember this conversation past the blur of childhood. Kindness is a symptom of community. Ms Lawrence tells her to build a community, and that it will take care of her as is its own nature.
She does not tell her what to do if Sally’s communities aren’t able to help her.
She does not talk about when nature bends into something divine or twisted.
Sally is five when she sees a face glimmering in the tree at the park that no one else can see.
Sally is five when her parents leave her with Mr. and Mrs. Goretti for a trip, pleasure or business she’ll never remember, and it was only supposed to be a week and a quick flight, so of course she is still five when Mrs. Goretti fetches the ringing phone and comes back a minute later sobbing.
Someone holds her from jumping into the grave after her parents’ empty coffins, and Sally, five years old, is squalling still.
—-
Uncle Rich is an irony. He is not rich. He’s a small wrinkled man that takes her to a church on Sunday mornings that’s more dust than congregation. He smells like smoke. He kicks the habit when Sally is ten, relapses once when she’s twelve, and is back to keeping the air in the house clear by the time she’s fourteen. In the times between Sally adds to the smoke, sneaking out to the corner to bum cigarettes off one of the Johnson boys that always seem so much older and so much larger, already in middle school, then high school before long. They’ll let her hang around after she’s gotten the cig sometimes, lean up against the telephone pole or the stop sign while she mouths along to Charlotte’s Web in a cloud of smoke and let her borrow their books for a change, or talk to her about what they learned in history and math between drags.
Uncle Rich says it’s a damn good thing the Johnson boys are gone to college before Sally can start making trouble.
Sally doesn’t understand what he means until she’s thirteen and learns about sex, and then fourteen and sees the landlord turn out a woman from the apartment next to theirs for being pregnant without a ring on her finger. But Sally makes trouble from the time the adoption papers are signed, when she’s still five and sobbing, so she doesn’t understand. Uncle Rich comments on it in a good natured way. Encourages some of it, even.
The people in his church don’t approve. Sally is growing up without a mother, they say when she’s seven and still small and rattled and tearstained most days, and Sally yells at them in the middle of Sunday School, throwing the doll they’d given her to hold while they went over scriptures. She isn’t. Her mother may be dead, but Estelle Jackson is still her mother. She isn’t growing up without one.
Sally is hallucinating, they say when she runs from the traveling preacher from Philadelphia and won’t go near him. He has scales, she tells Uncle Rich. Uncle Rich says he doesn’t like the man either, and after the cops find him stealing from a pawnshop three blocks down from the church, he stops listening to the accusations about her sanity.
Sally sees the world a little differently, that’s all.
—-
In order to make a call, Sally has to push the buttons on Uncle Rich’s Touch-Tone phone. There’s no operator, like there had been when Sally had called her grandparents from her parents’ phone, though it isn’t as though Sally has anyone left to make long distance calls to. She doesn’t even know if phone operators still exist. Billy’s mom used to work as one and now she’s at a bakery.
Somewhere else the phone rings.
But there’s something between her pushing the buttons and the phone ringing, something magic that exists in the back of radios and in engines that the boys in class talk about. Sally doesn’t have the mind for it. She doesn’t care about the wires, or the pulses, or the frequencies, or the circuitry.
She doesn’t need to. It isn’t a rock. It isn’t the sky. It isn’t the spray can the Johnson boys give her when she’s fifteen and they’re home for Christmas break and drunk and feeling generous, pressing it into her hands when she won’t take the cigarettes. She defaces the store two blocks away whose owner called her a whore when he caught her kissing a boy in the alley a week before, a quick peck before they parted ways after school that still puts a pit of anger in her stomach. The peace sign stays there for a month and the can of spraypaint is never found. There’s none of that sort of immediacy to it.
But Sally is aware that there’s something going on. Sometime between her dialing a number and the other phone ringing, something happens, something passes through the phonelines to cover that distance. And then the phone rings. Someone picks up or lets it ring out.
Talking has just as many layers. Crosses just as large a distance, it feels like.
“All this school is stifling her!” Uncle Rich says into the phone.
Sally is flipping through a National Geographics magazine. It’s old. Uncle Rich hasn’t been feeling well lately, and Sally hasn’t found it in her to spend her own money on a new magazine. She likes the ones about movie stars and fashion plenty fine, but she is fifteen, it is summer, and the greenery of the closest park has begun to look as grey as the sidewalks. She hasn’t seen anything special in over a year. Those special glimpses have never been frequent, but a whole year without makes her feel sick.
Uncle Rich has caught on, between all that translating she does. He’s heard that message through the layers.
Kindness is a symptom of community, and even though Sally won’t go with Uncle Rich to his church anymore and makes his few friends embarrassed by how quickly she’ll catch onto this week’s bush they’re beating around—it’s called a blunt when it’s marijuana, she tells them, and that Athens was Greek, not Egyptian, and that she knows Ms Price down the street is seeing a psychiatrist so they might as well just say it—they’re still a community unto themselves. A two-person island.
“I was hoping the ocean,” Uncle Rich says, holding the phone receiver with his shoulder.
Sally flips to another page. This one is a spread of Athens. That’s how she’d known. She’s read the article that goes along with it, so she stares at the ruins instead.
“I see. No, no, I see.” Uncle Rich sighs. He’s not getting the time off work that he wanted. “No, no, we can still go somewhere. Yeah, out of the city. It’ll be good for the both of us.”
Two weeks before Sally goes back to school, Uncle Rich takes her to a forest with a lake for a long weekend. They stay in a tent that leaks and brush their teeth with little splashes from their canteens. Sally gets a scratch on her leg when she falls out of a tree. It’ll scar, but she won’t know for another month. In the meantime, Uncle Rich bandages it up, laughs at her in great guffaws that turn into coughs midway through. They go swimming afterwards. Sally likes to swim. Loves it.
—-
She visits the ocean for the first time sometime between that trip and her senior year, and the silly thing, the thing that makes her laugh until she cries, is that she can’t remember it. She goes to the ocean and loves it gently.
After, she catches weekend trips with friends, with boyfriends, with girls from her classes and from up a few block, and sits on beaches, or hangs her legs off the pier. She remembers those. It took her long enough to see it for the first time, and she enjoys it easily enough, so she says she’s making up lost time. She plays volleyball and swims. Collects shells and then leaves them in a pile in the sand. Makes out on a dock and breaks up and curls pinkies with other girls, other young women, to cement promises that they forget about the moment they’re back in the city.
—-
Uncle Rich’s goodbyes feature coughs more often than not.
—
So maybe, if she’d been listening she would have heard the phone ringing, and figured out what was there, clear as could be.
—-
“It’s terminal,” Uncle Rich confirms. He’s staring at his boots. “I—I can’t help,” he says, and suddenly his voice is turning to water, eyes glassy under their flickering kitchen light, “but be glad through this all that you kicked the habit when I did.”
Sally isn’t.
“When did you find out?”
“Sally—”
“When did you find out?”
Uncle Rich’s lips tremble. “We found out it was terminal last week.”
Sally stays silent and angry at him for an hour before she’s crying on his shoulder, clinging to him like she can reach into his lungs if she just presses close enough and pick the cancer out like sand from under her nails. She can’t. She tries for weeks after but she’s never able to.
Uncle Rich gets smaller and weaker. Stops working.
Sally picks up more shifts after school, grocery stores, paper routes, raking leaves for the neighborhood on the other side of the school. Anything she can fill in her time with. This is her last year of school, and she knows she’s close, so close, so smart, so ready to fly into a future full of college and careers and pantsuits and heels with her friends, but she can’t bring herself to care about homework when she comes home to canned beans for dinner or the lights being shut off again.
The eviction notice is the last straw.
Taking care of Uncle Rich is more important that school, Sally decides. Kindness is a symptom of community. She drops out and works two jobs and keeps the lights on, keeps food on their table, keeps their apartment.
Uncle Rich doesn’t make it to June.
He dies before graduation.
Sally has him buried in a plot behind the church he went to. The pastor says barely six words to her, but the pastor’s wife coos over her in a funeral voice that’s more saccharine than somber, urges her to come back in two days, that’s Sunday, to check in, to come meet the other girls, to find a community, find support.
—-
In two days, Sally has moved to a different part of the city.
Her paychecks can afford Uncle Rich’s old apartment just fine, but Sally’s heart can’t.
—-
She wonders sometimes about Ms Lawrence, and Mrs. and Mr. Goretti. About the Johnson boys. About high school friends that stopped coming around when she didn’t have time for weekend trips to the mall anymore, let alone to the beach, that didn’t know how to handle the tragedy that was Sally Jackson’s life and so didn’t, stepping away little by little until she found herself unpacking boxes on her own without even thinking to call someone for help.
Pasts are tricky. She doesn’t like them. She lives here and now. Estelle Jackson is still her mom, Jim Jackson is still her dad, and Rich Jackson is still her uncle, but Sally has her feet on the ground and her hands on a case of chips that need to be loaded onto the shelf.
She wonders sometimes about Ms Lawrnence and all the rest.
But she doesn’t linger.
—-
Sally squalls at the world violently for a year.
—-
That’s a lie.
—-
Sally spends three years, eighteen to twenty-one and then seven and a half months past that, squalling at the world. She picks fights: with customers abusing coworkers, with men leering at her new friends, always new friends, as they walk down the street and then at the bars, with the ladies that scoff at her for wearing something like that when she’s unmarried, when she’s young, when she’s an orphan working menial jobs, with the people that seem see too much—that look at her like she’s seen too much—and scare her all the way home and tucked beneath Uncle Rich’s ratty old quilt.
Sometimes they’re physical. Sally breaks her second knuckle and it never heals quite right. But she prefers them when they aren’t. Not because she can’t fight, or is afraid to. There’s something about verbal sparring that she prefers. She can draw blood with her voice, and isn’t that powerful?
Time goes on. The endless rotation of new friends and new jobs spins as cheerily as the sun. Sally starts to realize she doesn’t have community. The new friends are rarely kind, the jobs work her down thanklessly, the coworkers are never the same.
She can draw blood with words.
But she begins to prefer confusion.
There’s a kindness in it. A kindness to her coworkers, to herself. Wit, sarcasm, and dry humor placate her community while she’s defending it. She gets fired less. The new friends that she finds are the kind to stick around a little longer, even if its just for an extra month, an extra year. The rotation doesn’t slow. That’s endless, and Sally wouldn’t want it to stop. It….shifts.
—-
By the time Sally turns 23 she’s still fighting.
She still remains.
But she doesn’t do it squalling anymore.
She does it with a sharp smile, with a library card in her wallet and a box of National Geographics magazines her coworkers gift her tucked next to her bed. She does it in a small apartment that doesn’t feel cramped anymore, that isn’t gloomy.
—-
By the time Sally turns 23, she’s saved up enough money, just barely enough, to go to the beach.
—-
Sally stares at the waves, stares at the kids running through the foam, stares at the people passing by. When a man walks by with a trident, she stares.
He glances at her and grins like he has a secret, so she raises a brow and crosses her arms when his path curves suddenly up the beach towards her.
—-
He’s lovely.
—-
She’s expecting a man that took his ring off for the week while he’s fishing off the coast and getting some summer sun, and in a way, she learns later, she’s right. But that man, the adulterer she expects when he plops down beside her, following her eyes up to the trident he still grips, all golden and glowing as if it’s only another one of those sparkles in the waves, is a business man looking for a quick fuck and maybe a few dates around town before his flight leaves. He’s a bland thing, that man, someone that doesn’t know about community and kindness, someone that isn’t paying attention to the layers and distance they’re communicating through. In it for the secret, for the pleasure, not for the experience.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
“Well, it’s certainly unique,” Sally offers the stranger, looking away while she tries to bite down on her laugh.
“Not the usual kind of fishing reel, I know,” the man says, as if he’s embarrassed, humble, referring to just another ragged fishing pole in a sea of ragged fishing poles.
“I didn’t know you could fish with a trident.”
The man’s eyes light up.
—-
He’s lovely.
—-
Oh, he is lovely. Sally spends the summer in a cabin in Montauk, which is half a lie, because most days she’s spending with this new man.
He doesn’t initiate anything. Doesn’t even try.
Sally feels like she’s being seduced, swimming, boating, fishing, looking at every shell, inspecting the sand, watching the waves in silence as they share a bottle of wine, something foreign and expensive that he brings out like magic, quipping that he’s got a good mailman. But she isn’t. She knows she isn’t. He doesn’t ask for sex. Doesn't kiss her, barely touches her at all. He’s looking for connection and Sally is like a neuron, branching out, introducing him to the new friends she’s always making, taking him to new restaurants as easily as he takes her out to different parts of the beach or out to the sea.
It’s in August when they first kiss. She initiates it and he deepens it. They don’t do much that night. Kiss, roll each other around in the sand, chase one another into the waves and back out.
Watch the stars.
Watch each other.
It’s sometime past midnight, when there’s no one else on the beach, when they’ve somehow gone unnoticed for hours, that he tells her about the gods. And then he sits up and drags her over until she’s sitting in his lap, and points at a tree, and asks her what she sees.
Sally sees a face peering down from the branches.
She looks at the distance between him and her, looks at the telephone, looks at the buttons, looks at the wires and the operators and the circuits, and decides to do away with the whole damn thing, just for once. She tells him what she sees.
And he tells her the truth.
—-
He is lovely. He waits the four days it takes before Sally can accept it, gives her tiny proof after tiny proof and the solid, unceasing connection.
—
They kiss and make up on the fifth day, but by the sixth, Poseidon leaves. Has to.
Sally waits another week for him before she leaves. She has to, too. The oceanside is expensive without a god bringing her food and drink, paying for her room for just another two nights, just so they can catch that one show at the bar, just so they can go fishing one more time. Sally puts her first seashell in her bag and drives back to the city, her boxed up belongings bumping around in the back of her truck.
Going back feels….not disappointing. Sally won’t hang her hat on anyone, not even a god. People come and go, and when Karma Chameleon plays on the radio she sings along. This isn’t something to weather. It isn’t another trial, another tribulation. This is life. This is what it means to remain. Sally basks in it, even if she misses Poseidon.
And if she checks out mythology books from the library, and keeps a sharper eye on what she’s seeing, on when she feels dizzy or deluded, then what of it?
—-
What she does not plan on is opening her door on a freezing November day when she’s been snowed in to find Posiedon waiting in the hall, hand still hovering over the doorbell.
“Am I still welcome here?” he asks, smiling in that sheepish, humble way that speaks of too much power, of too much of everything and his attempt to tamp it down, which is also too much, Sally thinks, and of that hunger for connection.
This time he’s seducing her.
He’s blunt with her. He wants to fuck her until the snow stops, wants to bundle her up and carry her up to Mount Olympus and never let her go, damn what Amphitrite has to say about it, as if gods that have been married for thousands of years can get divorces as easily as dissatisfied salesmen. He can give her whatever she wants, a pleasant evening or a cosmically satisfying night, or both, or anything in between. Whatever she wants.
But.
“Pregnant?” Sally asks, sipping her wine and savoring it. She knows now that its Greek, and a very old vintage at that. She’s thinking about pairing wine with sex, and then she’s thinking about pairing sex with wine, because she might actually want another glass more than she wants an orgasm—but both of them together?
“It’s always a risk, even with protection,” he admits. “Condoms might’ve been invented with the gods in mind, but it doesn’t mean they worked.”
He’s blunt.
But she takes him up on the offer.
It’ll be what closure feels like, for once, a leaving that’ll be because they went as far as they could, as far as they wanted, and then parted, not because of death, or tragedy, or anything else that’s plagued her life. He can give her anything she wants.
So he does.
—-
Oh, he’s lovely.
—-
Sally’s half expecting it when Aunt Flo doesn’t show up. She waits another two weeks before she checks anyways and doesn’t drink after that night, though that might be more to save herself from disappointment than in case she’s right.
First test is negative, but the next two are positive.
A trip to the doctor confirms it.
Sally’s going to keep the pregnancy. She’s decided that long before she took the tests, decided she wants to be a mother with the same decisiveness that she dropped out of school for Uncle Rich. This is hers. This is her body to use, and her matter to keep.
But the reality of it, the reality of motherhood like a dirty word, like a fate seeping out of the pastor’s wife’s mouth in sickly green smoke, doesn’t hit until after the doctor.
A kid.
That means no work—how long? How long until she can leave a kid alone? Who would she leave the kid alone with? And then—food, clothes, school, college—shit. A bigger apartment. A better apartment. A better life. The best for her kid, right? Better than what she had.
She’s still in the midst of the crisis when she gets back home and finds Poseidon at her kitchen table, sipping on coffee from one of Uncle Rich’s old mugs.
He doubles the danger.
Calls the child a demigod.
“I’m married, and I could never leave my wife. You have to understand.” Poseidon says it like he’s stating that the sun rises in the east, not like a plea. Another dismissive fact. “But I could keep you and the child safe. I could build you a palace under the sea. You’d be safe in my domain. A secret. No one would know about you or the child. They could train in my courts when they’re old enough. You’d never have to worry over food or shelter again. Over anything, really.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t want to live life like a secret. What kind of life would that be?”
“A safe one.”
Poseidon’s tone makes her want to pull his beard out.
“Safety is trite.”
“And the safety of your child?”
“Is my business. That night was closure. I appreciate the warnings, and I would appreciate it too if you do your part to keep my kid safe. But this is my kid, and my life. I want to live it, and I want them to be able live theirs too.”
—-
Sally Jackson has a son that squalls, kicks, screams, wails when he is born, kicking and fighting from his first breath. When he is four months old and her bank account is bled dry, she goes back to work. Begins building communities anew, coworkers that give coupons and referrals to the cheapest pediatricians that she can still trust. When he is two and Poseidon’s trouble starts following them, she marries to keep them safe, the ringing in her ears or the bruises on her skin be damned.
Sally Jackson remains.