charles joseph
stormwatching
i am never going to drown. this is because my father taught me to be safe around water.
in my head i am a dog, fleetingly outlined in rough fur and barking at the smallest of movements.
there is a seagull laying motionless on the sand. in my dog dream this is a warning; in practice i am
sitting alive and awake and unconvincing myself of saltwater.
forever ago, a small form is kneeling at heaven’s doorstep, softly repeating prayers
and we have been retracting those words since the spectre of recursive deaths entered our house.
in the darkened kitchen there is something pale, something shifting.
i wonder sometimes if i am swallowed by the waves in your mind, if the blood of christ is the only antidote
to a poison that sinks through our veins and into the cliffside.
but i am never going to drown. this is because the both of us can swim.
in my head i am your eldest son, held for a fragile moment in strength and sunlight. my boyhood is a refraction, an image of something falling short. we are stabilising forces, electric and fast-moving. there is sand in our shoes. the tides lash at the shore, just like they did when i was a child and you’d take us to watch the storm.
there was something transfixing about it, the unbridled panic tearing the beach apart.
secretly i think you wanted to wait it out every time, outlasting the weather long after its crying subsides.
and you did, we always have. there is no tenacity like that of two men who have to be absolutely sure
that the wind has slowed to a stillness, that there are no tiny bones strewn about the beach.
i look to the headland as it shelters us, counting the birds above our heads.
Charles Joseph, if that is his real name, is a Wellington-based university student. He studies computer science and thinks often about the beach.