The Girl from Cienfuegos

In my retirement, I became a piece of driftwood, splintered with the memories of a woman I loved as deeply as the sea.  I settled in Key West, roamed beaches where the cays and coral reefs infiltrated my dreams of a lover, much younger than I, bearing sugar cane and old promises.  She remembered the sun. At times, I polished off a bottle of Cognac Martin, feeling as if I could be a sailor, reborn. Each morning, I watched a girl walk past the coves, her bronze body, lithe, rhythmic, as if possessed by the sea.  She set out in a skiff, disappeared into its shallow draft.  By early afternoon, she'd return, walking past me in the distance. I imagined her eyes in a trance.  I imagined the drum of some distant lover who turned her out.  Over time, I chatted with her, the sea eavesdropping on our conversations, marking them.  She told me how Hemingway had once been one of her mother's lovers, how her mother, a Santerian, was tortured and killed by soldiers for refusing them the anchor of her body.  At times, turning her head of long hair, perhaps listening to the low tide, she claimed her mother, even after her death, could walk on the waters of some fine south coast.  South of everything.  We met on the shore, this girl and I, every so often, an irregular ritual.  I felt something returning and something leaving. It was foolish of me, a man my age, to want this closeness.  I asked her where does she go with her skiff.  I've never seen her fish.  Her lips pulled and her eyes ran down a stretch of ivory sand.  She said she rows to the middle of somewhere and there she sees the face of Hemingway, her real father, rise to the surface, how his eyes dance for her, how his lips open up as only the sea could.  Slowly, she rose and made her way to the skiff.  She never returned that morning. From that day on, I rowed out to the sea looking for her.  One morning, I reached some turbulent water and my boat began to spin, this slow centrifugal movement.  I looked below, and there was his face, the eyes wide, approaching the surface, the face, gigantic, a sea in itself.  My boat was caught in the stretch of his lips.  As they spread, my boat spun faster.  I bent over the gunnel, and said, Earnest, you must let her go. I am an old man and the fish don't bite the way they once did.  And with that, Earnest closed his eyes and sunk to the bottom of his sea.  I imagine him still smiling, that silly old man. 

Bio: Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey.  His work has been featured in Literary Tonic, Lacuna Journal, FourLetterPapers, Five Fishes and others.