Page 137 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

PETRA KUPPERS

Dolphin Pearls

The dolphins played beneath the soaring arches of the intra-coastal bridge. They twined

around one another, just a thin shell’s edge away from touch, and then lay on the

surface for a breath, beak to beak, and felt the sun dry them. The stickiness of salt skin,

tacky, where jawbone meets another sinus. They fell back from one another, and

accelerated into the diving game, tail fin high up in the air.

On the day Miranda’s mother went away, in the local swimming pool, Miranda hardly

wept. She was stunned, a 14-year old lanky and shivery in the tiled corridor. Her mother,

Cassandra, chose a spectacular way out. At the end of Cassandra’s aqua fitness class,

elbows still vibrating from a vigorous sequential jog, Miranda’s mother jumped up, up,

higher, and higher. All around her, her elder friends looked at Cassandra, the relatively

younger woman in their midst, their mascot fairy, their light one, smiling and twirling to

the Elvis beat. Cassandra smiled back, beatifically. People told Miranda later that

Cassandra spent a lot of time with the swimming pool mural, porpoises in mid-jump over

the waves, the realistic rendering surrounded by the starfish imprints of countless 3rd

graders’ small hands. Cassandra had looked at the mural hard, focused, as if there was

something to decode among the reds and greens, the yellows and blues of these

fingerprints, the plastic whorls holding the DNA of a whole community.

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