Image Credit: Florida Memory, State Library and Archives of Florida
Your teacher made you practice crouching under desks barnacled with ancient snot. Her sentences were rough with words like diversify and exemplify and she wore matching tweed skirt suits. You trusted her caution. Put your bottom facing the window, if shattered glass goes into your bottom it will do less damage. Your wide-eyed classmates giggled at the word bottom. The floor smelled like crayons rolled in grass and when a neighboring child farted, you forgot the dirt pricking your elbows.
There were storms that flung full-bodied cows like figurines, and shoved palm trees to the ground, and each hurricane season you watched your father pull steel shutters up by a rope to the second floor windows. The television spewed stories of the aftermath of the last category five hurricane: a man returned to his home and his roof was gone, and when he opened a kitchen drawer, purple tinged fish tumbled out, a mystery until he found a squid crumpled in the corner of the sink. The same hurricane lifted the lid off of a tank of Burmese pythons. With up to one hundred eggs per year, and a length of twenty feet or more, the invasive species devoured the scrubs and swamps of the everglades. Telephone pole sized snakes upon dissection, held deer nestled in their stomach like a pearl. A different storm grounded a beehive near a school, and when the children ran into the cafeteria, bees burrowed in their clothing and followed them inside. Your mother left the television on all day for updates on the hurricane with a path like a doodle on the coast. You sat in your bedroom and played, while your father drilled in panels that darkened your room into artificial night.
In preparation, your mother asked you to decide which toys to bring down from your bedroom, you sorted through what you wouldn’t mind finding decapitated in the street, soaked and shriveled. Your chosen stuffed animals held council on cardboard boxes of photo albums and insurance documents. The most beautiful animal, probably a striped cat or a blue jay told the other stuffed animals raise your tush to the skies to collect the glass, it won’t hurt. At the word tush, your mother’s nose flared. You dipped each toy’s face to the ground.
Image Credit: Florida Memory, State Library and Archives of Florida
The night of landfall, your family camped on the first floor of the house in sleeping bags. You were close to the small bathroom without a window, in the chance that a there was a tornado. Surrounded by your stuffed animals you dreamt of engorged lakes behind fences, water crept into your house, and alligators prescribed to manifest destiny—ridges above sordid water—swerved into houses and croaked under four post beds. An anhinga posed atop your faucet, drying its wings. How does one empty a flooded house? When the drain is unclogged, do ducklings and bubbled algae eddy around the couch? Paralyzed by the alligators, you couldn’t go downstairs to pull the tangled reeds from the drain. All around there was a sound of a creaking ship as the bones of your house bloated in the water. The edge of your dream pricked you awake.
When the first band of the hurricane arrived, your father would sleep with his hands across his midsection. He fell asleep when he couldn’t go outside to smoke for a while, like during hurricanes when the house was sealed, and right as airplanes leapt off of the ground. Your mother sat rigid in front of the television until the power went out, and then she sat rigid with a flashlight to her face, certain that the shingles have peeled like scabs, and that the roof would follow.
After the storm passed, the shutters were removed and your house became brighter than before. You watched your mother folded over her black-eyed susans with perlite stuck to her gardening gloves like pearls. A quick Google search told you that these plants are prey to slugs, aphids, mildew, and rust, but it won’t mention that dusty brown rabbits would bite off the flowery heads whole. Your mother taught you how some plants house caterpillars and some attract butterflies, and a few do both. A successful butterfly garden participates in the entire lifecycle of a butterfly. There were milkweed leaves heavy with stalactites of cocoons, and zebra longwings floated to passion flowers that clung to the fence. The crazed periwinkle flowers eventually popped up on our neighbor’s property and began to coil around the feathered dill, and choke the milkweed. Your mother had to pull the white veins out of the soil before it took over the garden. You put your head to the grass to hear the ripping of roots as she cut into the soil with a shovel, and threw clumps of dirt into a black garbage bag. The roots reached out like a hand.
When your mother felt nostalgic and when you begged with enough hunger, she excavated her art portfolio from the bowels of her closet and you sat in the hallway leading to her bedroom. She took out her sketches on paper soft as moth wings. The sprawling lines were drawn by hands you have never seen, but imagined being riddled with caffeinated shakes. You touched only the edges, and wiped your hands between sketches. If you were lucky she, let you keep a drawing and pin it in your room. After an hour, her eyes began to cloud, and with enough questions she would retire the portfolio. You never ask why this is not brought downstairs with the tax and insurance documents during hurricane season.
Image Credit: Florida Memory, State Library and Archives of Florida
*
Eventually you left Florida. Riddled with clichés, you became a foreigner with words that clunk in the throat and splash against teeth, and mistakes colored your cheeks strawberry. It is considered quirky when you talk of lightening striking palm trees and how they blacken from the inside out, or when you feared dismemberment in brown lakes. These thoughts were answered with you are not in the south anymore. Age evaporated the pool of shadows above your collarbones, and a neglected lactose intolerance rounded your body. You attempted to seduce granite men and women with your stories of a rabid land, you don’t realize that you are splashing your life in borrowed light. It was not just the sky that was vengeful. One of your favorite parlor tricks is to tell strangers about the time when you were in a silver coupe with a boyfriend. You were in the passenger seat on I-95 when a muffler fell from the underbelly of a seafood semi-truck. It bounced once in the lane in front of you before becoming lodged halfway through the windshield. The car carried the muffler like the rocket in the eye of the moon. The shards were so fine that there was nothing visible to pull out, but tiny droplets of blood freckled your limbs. That didn’t happen. It did, it really did. You told the ten year old boy you were responsible for about hungry sinkholes that swallowed buildings without flinching, of amoebas that lingered in stagnant water, of the barefoot mailman that went missing at the Hillsborough inlet after his boat disappeared and he needed to swim across. A feral place where humidity lined your sinuses and curdled your hair into knots. You told him this while you ate sliced tomatoes in puddles of olive oil, or chilled fruit from the fridge. He did not believe half of the things that you said about Florida. When you push the wilted fruit aside he says the damaged fruits are the most delicious, those are the ones the birds tried to eat before they could be picked. The mold on the fur of the raspberries was soft, it disappeared under your warm touch.
In Paris there are statues of women everywhere. Frozen figures on bridges, cathedrals, on houses, on shops. These exaggerated women cling to museums and get soggy in the rain. You tried to remember if you have seen a naked stone woman before, one that was not sexualized, you could not remember one. For an entire year, you don’t swim. You had to take a ten hour bus ride to Marseille, and after hiking to a small enclave where bodies unfolded on the rocks like lizards in the sun, you were stunned that there was no sand, but instead warm pebbles under your feet. No one wore their bathing suits under their clothes, they changed under a makeshift curtain of towels.
The window of your slim apartment was always open, it never rained hard enough to enter the apartment, and your three plants, potted in aluminum tins, loved the humidity. For the time that you live in France, you only experienced one lightning storm, but Florida had eight hurricanes. You remember how your father would clip all of the fronds off of the palm trees and build you a fort out of them before they were picked up with the garbage. In 100 miles per hour winds, these fronds become bullets. It made you smile because without fronds the trees become silly Q-tips. You never believed in a god, but once—as a child—during a thunderstorm, you were so fearful that you prayed to something. That something felt like a future self. You felt this god a few times in your life: when you are drunk crossing a bridge, when water is so clear you cannot sense the depth, and in the safety of that fort. You realize that your worries have thickened over the years, you would never crawl into a palm frond fort for fear of spiders.
Image Credit: Florida Memory, State Library and Archives of Florida
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Something happened that made you return to Florida, so you say exactly this: there is a family emergency and I had to return. People were curious about why you came back, but your brevity encouraged silence. Your dreams centered around women that come to a screeching halt, anchored. Sharp, shard-like women with joints like dried coral. Time rendered them into gothic cathedrals and sky scrapers. No matter where you live, you always hung a painting of three black-eyed susans with your mother’s initials scrawled on the bottom—preferably without direct sunlight, but still in a high traffic area of your apartment—so that when friends ask about it, you can say that your mother painted it with her own hands.
You walked on the beach, with indents on the back of your thighs from the clothes you wore while you drove. A thicket of sea grapes cast a wide shadow on the sand. Sitting, you peeled the skin off of a clementine, without breaking, the rind looked like the body of a woman. You left your bag in the shade and walked towards the water. It was not cold, but the water solidified your limbs. You used to swim past where the waves break, to stand on a sandbar and look at the curve of the coast, now you are slowed by the shifting shadow of a cloud on the water, and you don’t swim further than you can stand. You remembered that as a teenager, you stripped and jumped off of docks into water the temperature of blood. Near sunset, you could hear alligators croaking in that lake, but by night you floated on your back, watched as the stars slid out of their pockets, and when you felt bubbles tickle your back, you would swim back to the dock. Every reed that reached your breasts became the tail of an alligator, you felt their eyes from beneath the sawgrass. Stretched out on the dock, you laughed, revitalized, happy to look at the water collecting in your navel.
If you had to start at your beginning, your first hurricane happened while you were curled inside of your mother, and Hurricane Andrew was the first category five storm after a decades long lull. Hospital records show an unprecedented amount of mothers-to-be crowded into hospitals, fearful of the effects of a drop in barometric pressure, their underwear carried a thick sludge of blood. Your mother stayed home, you were safe under her bodily currents, and your house-to-be was left intact, while others were left with only the spine of their home.
You took a job as a teacher, and you are reminded of when you were in third grade, and your class went on a field trip to the everglades. You needed to wear boots that came up to your pelvis, a wide brimmed hat, a long-sleeved shirt. Your mother could not chaperone. The idea of submersion in the green crusted water without your mother was unbearable, so instead you volunteered in the school library. The authority of swiping library cards and scanning barcodes of laminated books calmed you. That same year, your mother asked you to scare a male squirrel before his claws shredded the screen door. You watched the chirping male squirrel rub his pink underbelly against the screen, until you raised the broom above your head, screamed and saw him scamper under the milkweeds. There was a calm squirrel that your father would feed honey roasted peanuts, his bare hand extended to the timid animal. You watched as she rounded over the month, and ten nipples perked through her matted fur. After a hurricane—you can’t remember the name of this one—your father found tiny squirrel pups curled like snail shells in the grass. One was living, and you named her Sunny after the radio station that your mother listened to when she drove you to school Sunny 104.3 South Florida. You fed her from a baby bottle every day until you woke one morning before the sun rose, and your mother, in a silk slip, sat with a coffee mug in her hands, and shook her head. There could’ve been internal damage when she fell from her nest in the winds, it could’ve been too early to be separated from her mother, it was impossible to be certain.
As a teacher, you had morning “alligator duty,” and you walked the perimeter of the school to make sure that no alligators burrowed under the fence in the night. If you found a pucker in the fence, recess was suspended until the offending beast was located. The air was heavy in the morning, and it darkened the fabric under your armpits. Somewhere close by a blue tortoiseshell rabbit sniffed a flower before grindings the yellow petals with their teeth. Outside of your classroom, bulbous banana spiders floated on invisible webs, their bodies were the size of a child’s hand. Occasionally a water bug shimmied under the door, and one of your students volunteered to pluck it out of the room and place it outside. Every time it rained, water seeped into your classroom under the backdoor. The flooring bubbled when dry. Half of your classroom would become unusable during a storm, but you would still ask your students to curl under their desk, with their bottom to the window and their faces to the mold-sprinkled floor, and your students would erupt in laughter because you said bottom.
Amanda Inman has worked as a teacher and a nanny before finding work at Penguin Random House. Her poetry and prose can be found in Paris Lit Up Magazine, Gargoyle Zine of Glasgow School of Art, and Chasing Light, a poetry anthology published by the Hillsborough County Public Library and YellowJacket Press. She lives in New York City with her cat and dog, Jazz and Billie.
