There was only a shingle of sand at the resort, seaweed accumulating on the shore in light, lapping waves. The remains were dismantled and skeletal looking. Alex couldn’t tell what it was from afar or up close. She had already poked at it with a piece of driftwood, studying its limpness, how the particles of sand poxed its veins.
The resort’s employees were easy to spot. They were unlike the rest—static and branded with unmatched sobriety. Their uniforms bordered on too nondescript, a white polo belted into pleated khakis. The man closest to Alex wore a string of puka shells tucked neatly beneath his collar. Through his tinted sunglasses, Alex couldn’t see his eyes, only a distortion of herself.
Her chest tightened as she caught the unexpected sight of her own reflection. She shoved the feeling to the side and it died out just as quickly as it appeared.
“What is all that?” Alex made a sloshy motion toward the sea. It was alarmingly desolate. Everyone was busy, buzzing around the bar and wading into the rectangled pool like a line of ants filing into a gutter of sugar water.
One of the walls was encased in glass, giving an illusion of endlessness. People clung to the edge, glancing down at the sliver of waterfall trickling into a mossy garden below. All of that human weight, the laziness of their grips—a half empty drink or swim trunked child in their unencumbered hand—made it bound to break.
No one seemed to mind. Worry wasn’t on anyone’s mind at a place like this. The line between reality and liminality blurred and bent, distorting the outside world until it was nothing more than a mirage.
“Seaweed,” the man answered.
“Seaweed.” Alex repeated it, slowly, staring at his shielded eyes, at herself.
The vodka sodas in her stomach had begun to pool, slurrying her thoughts. They came in flashes, fading just as quickly as they appeared. There was a certain freedom Alex felt, reserving the energy for herself rather than expending it on discerning expendable thoughts.
“It’s seaweed season.”
There was a lull, which the man gave no indication of ending. Alex smiled, more to herself than at him, and let her body drift away, guided only by the breeze. It acted as its own wave, an exhalation of the earth that she was happy to be swept up in.
At the shore, she watched the waves scallop over each other. She stuck her feet through the tendrils of seaweed. They were dried out, but somehow still damp, cloying at her ankles. It was impossible to tell if they were half-dead or half-alive.
The puka shelled man would know the answer, but when Alex looked back at the deck, she couldn’t find him. The bodies had morphed into a swarm of impractical swimsuits and blousy coverups crawling over one another in colonies.
Half-dead or half-alive. She would never know.
—
They ate outside, each of them gathered around a glass table shaded by a whickered umbrella. Its slates were spaced widely apart, only blocking the sun from certain angles. Serena bobbed happily in a high chair, a series of colorless pages splayed out with their menus. She pressed hard into one with a mixture of primary colored crayons, turning one of the corners into a shade of puce.
“How’s your room?” Adam asked. “All settled in?” He made a show of closing his menu and interlocking his fingers over it.
Alex felt a gauze of self-consciousness envelop her. Being the focal point of Adam’s attention, even for inconsequential conversations, had evolved into an interaction that felt formal. Alex could only blindly guess at Adam’s knowledge of her own life, all of its cobwebbed corners and buried bodies. The married men she dated, the abandoned plan to finish college, the silence between her and her mother.
Sandra’s innate desire to overshare was a foreign concept to Alex, as if there was no part of her mind that was off limits. No back corners that were purposefully darkened, no light she intentionally unplugged.
Alex was the opposite. She disconnected the bulbs of her mind constantly until there was nothing more than a narrow path leading her to the uncharted territory. A space for new, untethered thoughts. She preferred it this way, as if she were only plowing forward, digesting stray breadcrumbs of life that would inevitably lead her somewhere further from herself.
“The room is great,” Alex said. “I have two beds worth of real estate. I couldn’t ask for more.”
Each of them laughed, Alex the loudest.
It was her plan to address her aloneness outright. If it remained unspoken, it would take on a life of its own, transforming into a living, breathing thing that required force to avoid addressing. Then, in a grotesquely ironic way, it would become even more apparent. Each of them swerving around it like a carcass on the highway.
“Two beds,” Adam marveled. “And I don’t even get one to myself.” He chuckled at the last part of his sentence, placing his hand over a gut that he didn’t yet have but was likely anticipating in the coming years.
“I’m sure Serena would let me share hers,” Sandra’s eyes squinted toward him, a half-formed smile on her lips. “Then you could have one all to yourself.”
“I’m kidding,” he said, kissing her quickly on the cheek. “Kidding.”
When their food arrived, they retired their conversation. Alex picked at her shrimp tacos, watching Sandra and Adam share food from each other’s plates, widening their eyes when a bite was particularly good. Occasionally, they peered over at Serena, the pollution of waxy scribbles growing progressively larger and darker with each check-in. Her tiny knuckles turned white as she clutched the crayon, pressing more firmly over the same area.
Silently, Alex followed her hand, waiting for the page to rip.
—
Sandra sat on the lip of the pool, tossing in bits of plastic for Serena to fetch. Every few throws, she adjusted the sarong knotted around her waist, checking that it disguised the slight pudge of her stomach.
Serena reemerged from underwater, returning the objects to her mother. Sandra clapped excitedly and threw them back in again. Serena took large, dramatic breaths before going back under, holding her nose and retightening the straps of her goggles.
From the coolness of the inside, Alex watched their movements through the windows—Sandra throwing and Serena fetching. She stayed still until one of the khakied men held the door for her and she smiled liplessly, forcing herself outside.
Alex sat beside Sandra, dipping her feet into the water. They were wavy and distorted in the blue tint. “What are you throwing?”
Sandra handed her a flimsy bucket filled with pool water and brightly colored shapes. Alex picked up a starfish.
“They help her go underwater,” Sandra said. “She’s not scared when she has something to look for.”
Alex considered the tiny specks of color. Would they eliminate her own fear? She imagined the pressure behind her eyes, the water’s resistance to her own movements. She couldn’t fathom how one thing could erase all of it.
“See? She’s already back.” Sandra leaned forward as Serena resurfaced, doggy paddling over to them. The groups of pool goers standing in the water parted, smiling affectionately while placing a protective hand over their umbrellaed drinks.
Sandra offered her palm and Serena dropped an assortment of fake seashells in it. “Wow, you got them all.”
Serena exhaled. A flicker of exhaustion passed over her face, but it was quickly replaced with childish excitement. A pearly display of all her teeth, delicate and evenly spaced.
“You ready?”
Serena nodded and Sandra tossed them back in, the shapes sinking back to the bottom.
Sandra didn’t offer any immediate conversation. She was relaxed under the sun, watching Serena bob above and below the water.
To Alex, the sun was jarring. Like teeth, biting in and not letting go. Without meaning to, she silently inventoried the differences between their lives, trying to pinpoint exactly when each had occurred.
Sandra’s marriage. Before Alex was the other woman for the first time but after her dropping out of school. Sandra’s pregnancy. Before Alex and their mother stopped speaking but not after Alex had given up completely.
Alex fought the urge to say any of it out loud or ask anything overly existential. Conversations bearing any amount of weight weren’t meant to be discussed poolside.
When she glanced at Sandra, her gaze was set on the ripples in the water, reminiscent of Serena’s splashes. Her eyes followed Serena’s tiny body just beneath it, as if there was nothing else on her mind at all.
—
There was a bachelor party at the lobby bar. They hovered at the corner in a cloud of cologne and tequila. The one getting married was larger, more boisterous than the rest, a banner with cursive lettering draped from his left shoulder to his right hip. It was a comical display, the sparkles rubbing off on his hairless chest beneath it.
The sun had already set when Alex ambled in their direction, waiting for one of them to interact. She was bored, Adam and Sandra were long gone, in bed with Serena. She imagined them loafed within the confines of one bed, oval shapes varying in length beneath the white comforter. The television playing in the background—some crime show they watched after Serena dozed off. It was a wholesome thought, their togetherness.
“And what are you drinking?”
Alex glanced down at her half-empty cup, as if she were just realizing it was there. She let the men include her in the next round of drinks, each of them overly excited to share their mundane observations with someone new. One complained about the ocean, how it was filled with some stringy plant, had she seen it? Another showed her his sunburn beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt, daring her to touch it.
She brushed it lightly with her fingertip and he winced. “See?” he said. “See how bad it is?”
One of them interjected. “I told you that you have to reapply — stop making people touch it.”
When the bannered man came over to greet her, they exchanged names, and Alex immediately forgot his. There was a whisper of white around his left nostril, his pupils overly dilated. He described his fiancee without any prompting, telling her how they met at a bowling alley on different dates.
“It wasn’t serious though,” he assured her. “It’s not like I stole her or anything. It was high school so”—he laughed loudly—“you know.”
“Oh sure,” Alex said. “I know.”
“And who are you here with?”
The question came from a different man.
Alex took another drink of her vodka soda. It began to taste like regular water. She swirled it around, studying how the ice cubes interacted with the sides of the glass.
She described Sandra and Adam and Serena. Without any immediate reaction, she understood each of the men were deciphering her shortcomings, calculating why neither Adam nor Serena were hers. Where was her husband? Her child? Her anything?
She took a long slug of her drink and waited for the questions to be spoken out loud. Instead, one of them pointed to the palm tree just outside, guessing the odds he could climb to the top.
“I just need to feel the bark,” he said. “It might be too pointy.”
The man stumbled outside to get a closer look, and the rest of the group followed, crowding around the base of the tree.
Alex watched them through the window, each of them staring at the tree’s trunk with an unneeded level of interest. They had already forgotten her, as if the little information they learned about her was nothing more than a passing thought to them. It was only her that it felt uniquely heavy to.
—
Alex learned of the massage bookings only an hour before they took place. Her fingers were raisened from the ocean, clutched around a glass that tasted like polluted water. There was a cicada-like buzz to her movements.
The man who bought her the drink hadn’t left her side after noticing her alone. He had been part of the bachelor party from the night before. The one with the sunburn. Or the one who asked about the seaweed. Alex wasn’t sure. Maybe he wasn’t part of the bachelor party at all. They all looked the same to her—from afar and up close.
He was discussing his various forms of passive income—a condo in Philly, a house in New Jersey, the basement of a house in Alexandria—when Adam caught her by the elbow. He was rushing past her, midstep when he spoke, as if it were just happenstance he ran into her at all. He told her the hour she would need to meet Sandra for the massages.
“It’s in the West Wing,” he added.
“Where’s the West Wing?”
“I don’t know.” He pointed vaguely to his left. “West?”
The last response he shouted, pressing the unlit buttons on the wall to call for an elevator. There was an unsteadiness to his walk, an indication of one beer too many. Sandra must have given him a break from watching Serena, letting him partake in a wild afternoon that was tame by anyone else’s standard.
Privately, Alex felt pleased for him. He was a good person. There must’ve been an abundance of goodness in his life before he even met Sandra. Resenting him would be easy, but Alex decided against it, knowing it was undeserved.
Before the elevator doors closed, Adam waved to her in an overly zealous motion, his smile animating the entirety of his face. Alex replicated the motion out of habit, but it felt hollow.
“That sounds like fun.”
Alex had almost forgotten the man beside her was there at all.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “A lot of fun.”
The sliver of her mind that had been lit for their interaction had already started to dim. Her tasteless drink and the contents of their conversation had been emptied, poured out between them.
She wondered if he could see the light go out as she felt it.
—
Alex stood in the ocean until she could no longer see her toes, the seaweed clawing at her ankles. A bake of clouds had moved in, and an unexpected chill goosebumped her skin.
There were few people on the beach. A distant group of young girls, too skinny in their bikinis. Every now and then, a pair of them roamed the shore, hugging themselves when the wind blew. They picked up the occasional shard of seashell then discarded it back into the waves.
A small family joined, setting up their slatted chairs and striped towels behind her. Alex glanced back at them curiously. The father drove the stake of their umbrella into the ground, twisting it until it was sufficiently buried.
The oldest daughter, seated in the middle of the towel and still in her drawstring shorts, complained about the sand. It was too much sensory stimulation. She could feel each grain of sand as it stuck to her skin.
The mother picked up a handful of it and let it fall on the tops of her feet.
“You can’t feel it,” she said. “See, I’m fine.”
“You’re fine.”
“Look at her,” the mother said. “Her feet are buried, and she’s fine, too.”
It took Alex a moment to realize they were talking about her. The mother wasn’t wrong — her feet had been swallowed entirely. She could no longer feel or see them, as if they weren’t there at all.
“You don’t know, you can’t see her face.”
Alex wanted to turn around, to look at the mother and daughter directly and smile, confirming that the sand was fine, that she was fine. But she didn’t. Her gaze was frozen on the waves, the repetition of them overtaking one another in a patternless cascade.
—
Alex wrapped herself in a warm towel before the massage. Her clothes formed a small mountain in the corner of the room. It was a delicate, yet ornate pile, decorated with the strings of her underwear, like a cherry on a sundae.
Her phone was buried at the bottom, she hadn’t turned it on the entire time she had been at the resort. There was no one she needed to talk to, a fact that Alex was having a difficult time ignoring as she waited alone for Sandra.
She watched the flames of the candles flicker in the corner. They were perched on a trio of metal sconces of varying heights. Beside them was a potted orchid and a pair of champagne flutes, one empty, one full. Alex had already drank hers.
“It smells nice, doesn’t it?” Sandra appeared in the doorway, assessing the room with a thorough, sober stare. She made her way to the accompanying table and slid her feet out from the cartoonishly fuzzy slippers. They matched her robe, which covered almost every part of her up to her neck.
“It does smell nice.” Alex concurred, although she couldn’t smell anything of note. The air felt sterile, her skin salty.
She laid down on the cold leather, redirecting her attention to the ground. She stared at the beige of the floor through the oval hole in the table. It was an ordinary, muted tone, as if its purpose was to not be noticed.
Alex wanted to say something else, but couldn’t decide what needed to be said. Her thoughts were anxious and clammy, the silence beginning to take on a presence of its own. Alex peered across the room at Sandra.
She was leaning against the second massage table, sipping her champagne. When she drew the glass away from her lips, she studied the bubbles floating to the top.
Alex sank her head back into the headrest, the carpet looking back at her. It was only Alex the silence was uncomfortable for.
—
After a trail of stones was placed along Alex’s spine, both masseurs exited the room. In exaggeratedly hushed tones, they informed them that they would return once the stones had cooled.
“That was nice,” Sandra said. “Although I could do without the stones. Now I can’t even get up to pee.”
Alex could feel her own heartbeat in her ears, the weight of the rocks actively growing heavier. How heavy were they? What if her spine fractured? Was that possible?
When she checked in, Alex signed an overly bright screen with a vague, loopy signature, not reading its contents. There were too many paragraphs in too small a font. Now Alex felt she had made a horrible mistake. There was a possibility she had signed her life away. Like it was worth nothing at all.
“Alex?” Sandra asked from the other table. “Are you awake?”
Alex swallowed hard. An undeniable temptation to feign sleep magnetized her to the table. She imagined herself from a bird’s eye view, flat and two dimensional. Then, through the sunglassed lens of the puka shelled employee. She was buglike from both perspectives, small and squashable.
“Have you seen the seaweed?” Alex spoke to the fibers of carpeting.
“What?”
“It’s all over the beach.” Alex stared at the lack of color.
“What about it?” Sandra sounded more curious than anything. Alex could feel her gaze, studying the barness of her back, the stones crawling up her spine like a line of ants.
“No one wants to touch it. It’s like they’re scared to go on the beach.”
The champagne, the vodka sodas, the stimulation from strangers, had all worn off. Her mind threatened to light up, each crevice—cobwebbed and tarnished—on display.
“It’ll just wash away in a few weeks,” Alex stared unblinkingly at the beige. “It will be like it wasn’t even here at all.”
She turned her head slightly, only enough to get a look at her sister beside her. Sandra was already staring back, both of their existences paused, pinned down beneath the weight of the pebbles, but only for a moment.