The Ocean Becomes the Sky

Supremely still waters laid out to every side in sheets, marked here and there by strokes of feathered white texture and the torpid, teal shimmers of fish. The boy lay prone on his stomach, stretched out across his circular boat, made like a drum of oak planks and canvas flipped up onto its top. He had made his way to this spot slowly, shifting his oars around the circle of the gunwale to propel and steer, spinning like a top while he tried to push against momentum to move in straighter lines. Behind him, his wake was small and rambling, stretching back to empty horizon. He watched the long, curling line drift and fade, rocking left to right with the sleepy swells far under the water’s surface, and closed his eyes until the rocking felt accentuated, like the swinging of a pendulum.

He waited and let his boat list until the clouds in the west had dropped below the horizon. They were the last visible indication of the peaks by the piers, and the clouds would hang over their summits every day until late afternoon sun burned them off. He looked around, every direction the same, and squinted up to where the noon sun hung directly above him. Soon, even his weak wake dissipated as well, and he stood, spinning around and around in the boat until he got dizzy.

While the sky and sun whirled in his head he lost his footing and sat hard on the curragh bench, and he put his hands to his face while the unchanging horizon spun, and the unmarked sky, and the still air, and the fish-stroked waters, and the worn oak gunwale all spun. They spun in the same directions and opposite directions, moving left to right and back, quickly and slowly and both at once until the spinning became blurs tilted on every axis and he tried to reach his hands to his feet but they were behind him and above him and everywhere. He looked around until he saw the notch on the gunwale where he had dropped his case knife last year and knocked a knot loose, and he kept his eyes on it until everything spun around centered on the knot, but at least he knew where it was. After a few seconds he could reach down and touch his right thumb to it, pressing into the familiar spot like pushing a button, and everything stopped moving.

He stood with his thumb on the notch, looking and listening and realizing that it was very quiet, and that it had been very quiet the whole time. His thumb was stretched out in front of him and upwards, but the gunwale was a low one and his arm should have been stretched out down below his knees. His eyes snapped up and he had the disconcerting notion of looking upwards at the green flashes off the backs of fishes, and wisps of clouds that were actually breaking current and caps of the waters themselves. When he reached up, pushing his hand into the water above his head and pulling it back towards him, it fell up and away from him to fall back to its surface.

Relaxing his body and putting his hands on the boat above and to the left of him for security, he looked down at his feet. Just below him, centered under him, lay the sun, blazing straight up at him and casting strange shadows above his head. He stood and looked at it and thought of the circus, and an elephant balanced on a ball.