Inland Ocean | Heidi Bell
Our parents park the ancient pop-up camper in the sandy driveway. We kids and our friends sleep out here in the summer sometimes, at the bottom of what used to be an inland ocean. We fall asleep to the suck and billow of the heavy canvas sides, as though we’re on a sailing ship or inside the body of the breathing night, the belly of the whale.
I wake to my father’s shadowed face, his incandescent eyes. He and my mother are shaking us all awake. His hands gather me up. “It’s going to rain. Let’s go in.”
Instead, he holds me in his arms in the yard under the boiling purple sky as wind turns the oak leaves inside-out and bends the young poplars almost to the ground.
Nights when my father doesn’t come home, I imagine his permanent disappearance—car-crashed, drowned. He makes promises he doesn’t keep. He makes our mother cry.
“Look,” he says now.
A slender starfish stretches its legs across the sky, and its voice is everywhere, thunder woven through the air. It reaches across the humped backs of the bluffs, and an electric charge rises up from the ground to meet it, up through my father’s body and through mine, and we laugh with delight.
There will be years of strife between us before I accept what he is—elemental, a creature of instinct and chaos—before I understand how I am like him. How none of us asked for this. We all just ended up here somehow, together. Unjustified.
About the Author:
Heidi Bell’s fiction collection Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories was released by Cornerstone Press in October 2024. She works as a writer and editor of books and educational products.