Today I’m thinking about summer. Summer always seems inextricably linked to coming-of-age stories. Maybe because that’s when we’re allowed to be kids: summer, between school years, not bogged down by schoolwork and extracurriculars. Even for us new adults in our twenties and thirties, summer is when we take time off from our jobs to go be stupid at music festivals, or travel with childhood friends. Whether you’re studying or interning or working through the summer, there’s always a pause when our days stretch out like ladies at the pool.
As August draws to a close, enjoy these three stories about diving, swimming, and partying:
Dive into Adulthood. Headfirst: A Painting of Puberty
“Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace is a modern classic I read for a fiction class. Written in second person point of view (addressing the main character as “you”), the story follows a young boy who goes to an outdoor pool on his thirteenth birthday. He’s there with family, but wishes he wasn’t. He decides to dive off the high board. No one notices him; he notices everything: the girls with miraculous hips, his whale of a dad, the bored people lined up in front of him. He’s on the cusp of understanding it all as much as he’s starting to understand why he wakes up with “a dense white jam that lisps between [his] legs.”
Wallace is good at stretching time with variation in sentence structure. Run-on sentences linger on the narrator’s burgeoning sense of wonder, and short, repetitive fragments convey his anxiety. The story takes course over less than an hour (crossing the pool deck, climbing the tower, and diving), but Wallace zooms in on micro-details like “hard coins of light” on the surface of the outdoor pool and the scent of “a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals.” This meticulous painting puts us in the mindset of a boy in the throes of puberty who starts to take in the world through heightened senses.
Get out now and go past your parents, who are sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel means talking and talking means thinking. You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. — David Foster Wallace, “Forever Overhead”
Swimming with Sharks: A Meditation on Anxiety
The ocean is full of possibilities and sharks. In “Beware of Sharks in Lane Six” by Abigail Waters for Driftwood Press, the narrator grew up anxious next to her adventurous brother. They both collected facts about sharks and other predators: he’d tell his sister how a shark in captivity will run into walls until it dies, and she’d quietly memorize the odds of getting bit by a shark (1 in 5 million). Throughout the years, the narrator loses her brother, but not her restlessness. Like a shark, she can’t seem to stop swimming. Away from what, she’s not sure.
I thought this quiet, understated tale was a lovely portrait of an anxious girl who grows up to be a restless person. Some of us are born more fearful than others, and there isn’t necessarily any shame in that. We just have to find ways to cope. The straightforward sentences lend to a dreamlike feel throughout the piece that spans decades within four pages. Her prose feels like the 90s in a way, neither rich with experimental fragments and punctuation nor terse and minimal.
We couldn’t see the shark from where we parked our car, but we sat in the blue Volvo station wagon and imagined it swimming under us, swimming towards us, just the same. We always loved making games out of scaring ourselves like that, and we were still young enough to believe that sharks were what we should be afraid of. — Abigail Waters, “Beware of Sharks in Lane Six”
Dance Like the Rent Is Due: An Ode to Joy
Feeling exhausted? Burnt out? Despondent, or too tired to be? That’s how Keisha starts off in “Paid in Full” by Sarah A. Macklin for Fiyah Literary Magazine. It seems like life is little more than making ends meet and keeping her little brother out of trouble — but he’s up to something. She can tell by the way he glows, the reverent awe with which he speaks of a rent party at Miss Yasmine’s. Who’s Miss Yasmine and what is she doing to Keisha’s brother? Keisha’s journey to find out takes a fantastical, soul-healing twist.
Fiyah Literary Magazine’s staff voted for “Joy” as the theme for their 2020 themed issue, and their authors delivered. Run by and for speculative fiction writers who are also “Black People of the African diaspora,” FIYAH features diverse voices around the world, spanning ancient mythology and cyberpunk futures. “Paid in Full” is a quieter story set in a familiar setting: America today. Sardonic humor provides a citrusy undertone to the slow build up. Happy endings are hard to land. I’m so grateful Macklin pulled it off.
Renewed was the first word Keisha could think of to describe how they looked after the shedding. Refreshed. Free. Joyful. And she realized she wanted that desperately. — Sarah A. Macklin, “Paid in Full”
Enjoy what you have left of summer!
