Sunday Afternoon: A Bayou Tale

Sunday Afternoon by the Window: A Bayou Tale (Submitted for a contest to Florida Weekly)

by Paula Michele Bolado

Some people may think it odd for a ten year old girl to take extraordinarily long baths on Sunday afternoons, but if they knew that was the time that the spell worked best in the flickering light of the sun bouncing off sable palms outside my grandmother’s bathroom window, they might reconsider their judgments. Yet, how would they know unless my grandmother told them. I do know that people gave me odd looks whenever I shopped with her at Bailey’s General Store, so I imagined if they knew I said incantations with lighted candles and a giant shell talisman given to me by Mrs. Ranzoni, I would be hauled away to a nut factory. They whispered through smiles and casual hugs flung at me. I don’t know most of the women who clutch me tight for a quick second while my grandma always tells them, Thank you, we are doing fine, and one time, yes, she’s all set for the new school year. 

As young as I can remember, whenever my parents fought, I made my way down to my grandmother’s dock at the edge of Dinkin’s Bayou; I had always wanted to be like any of the creatures who gathered here, where they didn’t have to deal with the troubles humans had.  One particular evening, my father had come home from the shop, gripping a bottle of wine in one greasy hand and a dozen roses in the other. My mother had been studying all day for a nursing test, but my daddy wasn’t having it. He tossed her books and demanded that she love the roses. You don’t like anything I do! He had yelled. She threw the flowers and next I remember, he threw her. 

Within moments, I found myself standing on that dock, watching a great blue heron dance like a ballerina between the knees of the mangroves. A great splash startled the heron to flight, soaring away like a gray angel, swooping all that was ill in the world behind.  Here in the folds of the warm bayou’s wake, a scaly orange tail as great as a dolphin lifted and plunged into the green waters where manatees and dolphins coalesced with the other creatures below. The sunset’s light cascaded on the ripples of the water, an evanescence of corals and lilacs, masking what I knew was something unworldly here with me. While this creature flicked its tail as it swam the length of the bayou to the east and west again, I missed hearing the gun shots. It was a Sunday afternoon.

The ambulance came, the police came, and child services came. My grandmother had been at church dinner when it all happened. She obviously didn’t know she would come home to such grief, or a missing granddaughter, who hours later turned up soaking from bayou water. There were rose petals strewn throughout the house.  

After a month, I began taking baths, so not to leave my grandmother’s side too long, and it was there that I could not be disturbed. My grandmother believed that I was a child who needed water to quench my grieving spirit and to fight the demons out of me. Outside the window lizards crept along the old glass only to leap away when black Ben Yasi swatted as cats do. Mrs. Ranzoni had given me Ben Yasi a week after the funerals. She said I needed him more. Along with Ben Yasi, she had given me an old beige king’s conch shell with brown spots the shape of diamonds along its bumpy whorl. She said they were for me to say my wishes upon.

You must believe that you can control the outcome of your desires. This is no ordinary shell. Ben Yasi is no ordinary cat. You are no ordinary girl. Light candles in the dark and set the shell where it’s safe and quiet. Control that which you cannot seem to control. 

After my wishes were said, the candles lit, and the afternoon light splashed through the rectangular window, in the salted water, my skin began rippling into bumps the size of cockle shells. Painfully my skin in coral iridescence puckered and mutated to where between my thighs converged and shaped into soft luminescent, cylindrical scales that looked like jingles found on the beach. The skin along my feet fanned out into rays, joining them together into a webbed tail. I now controlled the orange creature here.