Sabbaticals with my family were always a special sort of adventure; we would tumble into the mom's car (an exaggeration; they would switch off turns in the passenger's seat, caffeine and pastry powered drives swapped for small and exhausted passenger-seat naps, while I stretched my thin legs solitary in the backseat) or squashing into the chairs of an plane like toothpaste resting on bristles, awkward, clinging to each other and the hard armrests. It was like a gorgeous lifetime occurrence; we left pale and came back loose-limbed, pockets packed with wholesale jewelry.
We flew to the Caribbean once, on a cruise ship like a skyscraper tipped sideways and still rolling from the momentum of the fall. It was a small infant's imagined house, floors like marbles and fireworks under scraped faded plastic, carpets printed with falls of printed ribbons obscured to subtlety by a baker's dozen cigars, huge robots of banged-up metal that dripped ice cream into paper cups. I danced through the slatted halls, the jangling endless days and the slick silvery evenings dripping like mercury across a dance floor. Ice cream melted between my teeth and the girls wore dresses shaped like trumpets and forks. I saw them play games at midnight.
There was a carnival on the island, a party nailed down by sharpened stakes and cash registers. I fastened my hands to my mother's wrists and followed her, slid our way among the dazzle and the tangle, the quiet separate pockets. She purchased a pair of earrings, wholesale jewelry, small silver birdcages filled with swishing sparks of crystal. They hung from her ears with a serious heaviness, infant planets, deep sea fish dangling lures. They gave her migranes from the brightness.
I envied her so badly that I pulled away from her new gravity to find my own wholesale jewelry. The woman was hawking silver by the kilo in shining slick heaps, waving it over her scale like a wizard with a top hat. Shining mazes whispered across my ears, living fish wriggled around my wrist, slipping head to tail like students in line at the zoo, organized. I didn't have the money so I pried them off, heavy with disapproval, their scales snagging on the fine hairs on my arm. I've never been able to keep a fish alive since.
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