Galveston Bay by Andrea Lewis
Poetry editor Brenna Dean on today’s short: Pick your three favorite words from Andrea Lewis's "Galveston Bay." Say them outloud, once, twice, three times. Delight in the language of this story, the way it takes you to the bay, reminds you what it smells like, of its history, its creatures, even if you knew nothing about Galveston before reading. This story speaks so intimately of the area, with such complexity and cohesion, you'll feel as if you've grown up here. You won't want to leave these shores. You won't grow tired of those three favorite words you picked from "Galveston Bay" no matter how many times you repeat them.
galveston bay
Midnight, and the estuary’s tidal pull pulls me awake. A longing in the blood as the blood moon rises, irresistible, gravitational, luring me downriver from the mountain, the man who sleeps beside me––solid, bony, igneous––while I am aqueous, fluid, piscine. His heart holds old volcanoes, pyroclastics, jasper. My heart holds aestus––the surge, the boil––innocent until it finds salinity. Sinful, all that intermingling: mangrove, oyster, spoonbill. I love the violence, the battering at the boundary of salt and fresh, the San Jacinto and the Sea, hurling themselves against each other, every night, heedless, headlong, every night, changing me. I am diatom, rotifer, copepod with one red eye. I am José de Evía weaving my lugger up the Gulf Coast for my king. Measuring tides, surveying bays, drawing maps. I am the shrimp he nets for supper, the turtle he harpoons for soup, the ink he commits to parchment. I am known in Spain as terra nova, land claimed, waterway claimed, every living thing claimed; bequeathed the name of Bernardo de Gálvez; every living inlet crystalline, unspoiled, teeming. The tide recedes. I retreat to the mountain, smelling brackish, trailing cordgrass, shedding plankton, shells, and sand, surrounding him with susurrus he’ll never hear.
Andrea Lewis writes short stories, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from her home in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in over forty literary journals, including Prairie Schooner, Epiphany, and Raleigh Review. Her collection of linked stories, What My Last Man Did, won the Blue Light Books Prize and was published by Indiana University Press.
