Diversity Rules Magazine

8 Diversity Rules Magazine September 2015 Kristen MacKen- zie lives on Vashon Island in a quiet cabin where the shelves are filled with herbs for m e d i c i n e - m a k - ing, the floor is open for dancing, and the table faces the ocean, waiting for a writer to pick up the pen. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Rawboned Jour- nal, GALA Magazine and Extract(s) Daily Dose of Lit. On a day when it's cold and sunny and I've been giv- en the gift of free time, it's an easy choice to take the kayak out and see what I can find. It feels heavy and awkward after having not done this for weeks, lifting the boat and balancing it on my hip down the boat launch. I go slowly on the wet parts, cautious of a fall, not that it's ever happened. I have every weekend to myself, and not all of them are rainy. Why has it been so long since I've done this? e water isn't perfectly clear, but I can see down twenty feet or more through a kind of pale green murk that doesn't obscure as much as give an odd shape to the things below. My arms are sore from working out and I paddle slower than usual. From the quiet that goes along with my easy pace, I hear a strange soft thump from shore. It isn't the footsteps of a run- ner, as I expect. I see an enormous bird crouching over something on the sand, coiling its body to pull great ripping bites with such force that its tail feathers come down with a smack each time it tears a piece loose, making the sound that caught my attention. I listen more carefully, and I can hear the flesh-fabric of what- ever lies on the sand held by talons separating and tiny bones snapping. I lift the paddle from the water and sit entirely still, watching, feeling invisible until the bird looks up and then returns to its meal, deeming my presence insignificant. e boat bumps into the first pier, standing free of any structure in groups of three or four tall posts stick- ing out of the water twenty feet and extending down into the invisible bottoms, wearing lumpy blue coats of mussels and barnacles. I can see down far enough in the pier's shadow to watch fish nearly a foot long, fat in the middle and narrow on both ends with black-tipped opaque fins. ey flap slowly as they move under the boat, as curious of me as I am of them. When my eyes adjust and the surface becomes still, I can see that the pale orange shadow alongside the poles isn't distorted light; it's a school of long, skinny fish, sunset-colored, all moving at the same speed and in the same direc- tion. I wonder why the bigger fish aren't eating them. Crabs perched on stiletto-heel claws over the mussels, shells deep red like a pomegranate, others draped in algae, sit perfectly still, just like the sea stars further down, splayed across the naked lower lengths of the post where tides never reach. Some of the sea stars are hunched around themselves, legs tucked in, and I watch closely through the green shadow-water, hoping what I'm seeing is the purple flex of an octopus, but it remains still, and the boat drifts further, bumping into the next post. e visible geometries of a jellyfish, nothing more than a hoopskirt of translucent structure with four golden eyes in its center, moving with a slow, steady pulse through the water, passes under the place where my paddle hangs from the edge of the boat, dripping. I want very much to put my finger into the water and touch the creature that looks like nothing at all, to feel the nothingness of it. But I don't. e next group of poles the current carries me to is a confusing inversion of the sky above: clouds below, clouds overhead. Giant frilled anemone stick out un- evenly from the poles far down below, visible through the murk because of their brightness. I can see both worlds suddenly, and neither looks entirely real. e sky is green with clouds, the water is blue with clouds, and again I want to put my hand in the water, through both worlds, connect them somehow. But I don't need to. A living link swims straight for me. e tiny pop of the world below breaking through Two Worlds - Con't on page 13 Two Worlds By Kristen MacKenzie

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