Jupiter Glow

Pam discovered diving in a catalog at forty-five while eighteen thousand feet in the air. The pages were waxy, thick, showcasing the flawless ass of some vacationing decathlete stitched into a wetsuit, one flipper tipping towards the camera while the shot caromed down the back of his calf, his thigh, over one impeccable glute, dashed his long back, and captured the vivid blue where a pregnant Mako orbited away.

Touching down in Miami, Pam slipped from the geriatric in his outsized tux, her name on his ledger, and caught a bus past the hotel hosting the summit. Its sign scrolled circles: MIAMI WELCOMES YOU, MIDWESTERN ASSOCIATION OF URBAN SUPERINTENDENTS. MIAMI WELCOMES YOU.

She bought a paisley wetsuit under a palm-thatched roof. She followed a pair of pectorals down the docks where she paid him half her last paycheck to ride with him on his jet ski, pressed close to his back, each breaker solemn and erotic, his hips clutched between her thighs.

The thing was, everything was ending.

The oceans. Her career.

They were texting her from Detroit. She hadn’t checked in.

They were calling from the summit. She was supposed to speak.

And later that night, while Pecs washed away the saltwater and sneezed louder than the drumming shower, the waves seen from her balcony looked fuzzy. Fuzzy, like a memory of a mossy tree she’d touched on a school trip, forever ago, when they’d taken her fifth-grade class from Detroit to the Upper Peninsula, all the adults standing smoking while she and her peers shrieked into the trees in fits of mischief.

“They’re jellyfish,” Pecs had explained when she first saw the pinkish waves. “Don’t know what kind.” They’d revved a blue wake through that peach, through that phoenix-sand, salmon-run, and jupiter-glow, flinging gelatin ribbons higher the faster they went. “Ocean’s changing,” he said. “Keep your mask sealed. Don’t know what touching them might do,” and he toppled under with more a splut than a splash.

Under, that pale desert fluoresced Fresno-blue. Nothing to see but his thumbs, doubled up, and a clam graveyard, pearled knobs of cartilage and fishbone. Time was the tin hollow of her own air. The world beneath that jelly canopy left the same faded impression as a lace nightie she’d since lost in a fling with the first principal she’d fire for fiduciary misconduct.

Rising, the pressure popped the mask off her face. Her bare cheeks felt their tentacles’ tendered peach touch.

They’d left the mask, a translucent grey well in the otherwise pink sea, and Pecs had turned the jet ski with a twist of the wrist. She looked ahead and sneezed a viscous, jupiter-glow jelly between his shoulders.

*

“The oceans are dying,” she explained to us later, poolside at The Four Seasons, Pontiac, where the district took executive leadership as summer came on, bringing with it a plague of sirens singing gothic song. “They don’t stand a chance.”

We told her, “You don’t look so good,” as she sneezed fresno and softshell into one terrycloth sleeve.

Her diving suit and tank sat tangled and silver at her feet. She shrugged. “I’m finishing this one.” She sipped. “Then I’m going in. Enjoy yourselves. This is for you.”

And even later, up on the ballroom’s balcony, we sneezed salmon-run glue into the faces of pretty teachers we’d told we’d network with. We dribbled apologies as they left. We looked down to that still blue bottom and found Pam sunk there, bubbles leaving that paisley skull like a god bless you.

Foley O’Brien is a writer, environmentalist, and educator based in Washington, DC. He has previously attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and One Story’s Writing Circle. An avid morning person, please find him on a bike looking for birds as the sun comes up.