The Light Pirate
Lily Brooks-Dalton
for Ofurhe
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Power
Somewhere west of Africa, so far from land the sky is empty in all directions, a storm begins. The water is warm, the waves are high. The air is heavy with moisture. A breath of wind catches, then circles back, churning itself into something new: a closed circuit gathering power, tighter and tighter. In this way, the storm grows. It matures. Learns to hold a shape. The warm water feeds it, fattens it, then urges it westward. Electronic eyes watch as it skims across the Atlantic. Soon enough, it earns a name. Reports are written about its speed and size. Preparations are made. There are other storms in this ocean, other pockets of hot, moist wind and rain-heavy cloud. But this one—this one will outgrow them all.
Chapter 1
Frida watches Kirby from the kitchen window while she washes Yukon Golds beneath a thin trickle of water. Scrubbing at the dim yellow skins, she decides not to peel them. Maybe the boys won’t notice if she mashes them thoroughly enough—and if they do, she will cite nutritional value. Outside, beneath a bloated purple sky knifed with the sharp fronds of a coconut palm, Kirby stacks sandbags against the door to the tool shed. Even with the AC blasting, Frida can smell the rich stink of thunder in the air, something like ozone and gasoline and dirt all mixed together. The hurricane is close now. She can taste it.
The baby kicks so hard she holds on to the counter until it stops. It feels as if this tiny, unborn thing could topple her. She asked—no, begged—Kirby to take them north, beyond the cone of uncertainty, but this is the third hurricane of the season and the third time she’s wanted to evacuate. The first one fizzled into a tropical storm before it even reached land. Heavy rain and a stiff wind and that was all. The second crawled up the opposite coast, wreaking havoc in Sarasota and Tampa, then swung back out into the Gulf. Before each one, he listened quietly to her pleas, calming her fears without succumbing to them, but then this morning something in her husband shifted. “Get yourself together,” he snapped. “We’re not leaving.” She was stung, shocked by the hardness in his voice. A new sound. Or new to her. It was just over a year ago that they met. Only six months since they married. There’s so much to learn about one another.
Even if he were not bound to these storms by his work as a lineman, he would still be bound by something else. She has always understood this about him. He would still insist that this house is the safest place for them. This house—fortified by his labor, shielded from ocean winds by the wild tangle of live oak and cypress that looms just beyond the yard, but mostly guarded by the strength of his will. And isn’t this at least partly why she fell in love with him? This faith in the strength of his own preparations. This promise of protection. A stolid, immovable weight—the anchor secreted inside his rib cage, holding him to the earth, to Frida, to Florida. If he believes they are safe, then maybe she can, too.
Resting a hand on her huge belly, she drops the last potato into the colander and twists off the faucet. The panic that has been with her all morning sharpens. It wasn’t always like this. She used to be brave. Didn’t she? The woman she was feels impossibly far away now, like a dream she can’t quite remember. A thump outside startles her, but it’s only Kirby laying down another sandbag. This is who she is now. The anxiety has become part of her. There’s something about the way the baby has been stirring today that is almost urgent enough to make her get in the truck and go north by herself. There are his keys on the table. She could just leave everything where it is: chicken already in the oven, greens on the cutting board, potatoes in the colander. Would she take her stepsons? They wouldn’t come even if she wanted them to.
All morning, the roiling clouds have been wrapping tighter and tighter around the sky and now all the blue has been squeezed out of it. Out the window, she watches Kirby admire his pile of sandbags in front of the tool shed and move on to the house, so sure his preparations are impenetrable. So sure of victory against his old adversary. The big coconut palm hanging over the yard sways. Its roots are sunk deep beneath the wilderness lurking at the edge of the property, but its trunk swings out over the lawn as if the wild is reaching for the house with those big fingerlike fronds. As if it’s trying to caress the family that lives here, or to crush them all. Or both. Frida knows all about beauty and violence arriving together. She’s seen it up close; she knows what nature can do.
Kirby lifts a conciliatory hand when he sees her there in the window, and Frida, still holding her belly, trying to shrug away this sense of dread, turns away without acknowledging him—not because she is angry but because she is frightened. When they fought earlier, he took her frantic appeals to evacuate as an insult. “Why can’t you just trust me?” he asked, bewildered. She didn’t know how to tell him that this was the wrong question without knowing what the right one was. They still haven’t made up.
Kirby’s boys come tearing into the kitchen just then, all arms and legs and sounds too big for those little bodies. They are immune to the fear that curls up on Frida’s shoulders, nestling softly against her neck, pressing up against her windpipe—a gentle, invisible stranglehold. They feel only excitement in the simmering electricity of the atmosphere, the barometric pressure plummeting as each hour passes. She can almost see the current running through them: Lucas skidding across the tile floor in his dirty white socks, Flip leaping after him, midair, falling, fallen, and upright again, all in the space of a breath.
“Boys,” she chides, doing her best impression of a mother. She has so little to guide her in these matters—when she was growing up, her own mother’s defining characteristic was her lack of mother-ness. Everyone said so. It isn’t that Frida regrets the way Joy raised her. How could she? Her childhood was singular, spent sailing between islands, with salt in every crevice and a vision of the sun permanently etched into the backs of her eyelids. She grew up everywhere and nowhere. The Keys, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Haiti, Panama, Venezuela. The only constants during Frida’s formative years were her mother and their decrepit sailboat and the ocean itself. There was no school outside of Joy’s instruction, and the friends she did manage to make could last only until Joy announced a departure date. When they pulled anchor, Joy always said it was time to find a new pair of sea legs. What’s wrong with the old ones? Frida would think. But she never complained. Of course she used to be brave. She had to be.
“Boys!” Frida says again, louder this time, but it still feels like a performance, something she’s only seen on television. They can tell, and so can she. If Joy were here, she would do all of this differently. She would be running through the house alongside them, playing their games, learning their secrets. She would be so unrelenting in her mission to win them over that finally these boys would have no choice but to love her. Except Joy isn’t here. This is the ache Frida is learning to live with.
She hears Flip and Lucas hurtling through the living room, the brisk creak of the screen door opening, and then a slap as it swings back against its frame. Out of sight, Kirby roars and the boys shriek, even Lucas, who recently decided that twelve was too old for games like this. All three of them round the edge of the house, back into view—the boys darting past the window, Kirby lumbering behind them with arms overhead, fingers wiggling. Frida instructs her nerves to settle and shoos away this circling, spinning unease. See, she tells herself, it isn’t real. No one else feels it. Everything is fine. She holds this assurance. Examines it. Does she feel better? Maybe. But then the baby, turning again and again, thrusting its limbs up against the constraints of her womb, up into her intestines, dislodges the seed of calm. Everything is not fine. Frida props her stomach up against the edge of the counter, and the Formica presses against her, against them both. She lets the edge dig into her, trying to quiet this spark inside her, but there is no suppressing it. Maybe this feeling is just a symptom of the murky greenish-yellow glow outside, or the way the baby is churning inside her today, or these unbidden memories of her dead mother, or the fact that this season, more catastrophic storms have made landfall than any other…a record that will undoubtedly be broken next year, and then again the next. But most likely, she thinks, it is the cumulation of these things packed together in the dense, hot air. It is the multitude, the crush of it all, the claustrophobic humidity of the atmosphere flooding her body, swarming along the surface of her skin. Surely that’s it. It’s overwhelm. Hypervigilance. Anxiety masquerading as intuition. But isn’t there at least a chance it’s the opposite? A pulsing intuition that she is trying her best to disown. A voice telling her that staying here will cost a great deal.