A Body of Water in a Body of Water

by Stevie Belchak

An Honorable Mention from the 2024 Essay Contest

It is two weeks before you make yourself known to us, and my partner, T, and I have taken our kayaks to Key West’s Cow Cut. Around us, the mangroves look like hundreds of transfigured giants. Their prop roots twisting up from the water take the shape of gnarled legs, their heads heavy with dense sprays of green. Together, the dense sprays work to shut out the sky. They create a thick canopy that wraps around the stagnant Caribbean air—the canopy then forming tunnels, or the illusion of tunnels.

Under the thick cover of the intertidal forest, the roar of the motorboats is dampened, and the tourist-filled jets flying in from Miami, Orlando, and Charlotte become no more than murmurs against the tinny sound of insects filling our ears. Here, we move softly over the tanned water—ducking our heads and minding our paddles, careful not to catch in the roots’ recesses or hit the waxy green overhead. Quietly, we float by two limpkins pawing over the great mangrove snarl—their coats like speckled dirt. The birds mine the ground with their curved beaks. We are careful not to take them away from their work—letting our hands skim the water and serve as occasional fenders against the mangroves’ above-water roots. Eventually, we hit a dead end, and T—ever the mariner—guides us back through the thicket—back into the canal, where we take a break.

Peeling back the rinds of oranges, we spy the silvered head of a desiccated bonefish drifting by on a current. Its skeletal remains slink white and disjointed under the cloud-dark water. In time, the current overtakes the dead fish and what would be its gut snags on a series of limbs—its head jostling about.

As we watch its funny skeleton jiggle amidst the thick tangle, roots—not unlike the mangroves’—sink down into the mud of my own middle.

Within me, new cells are in the midst of creation: dividing and then subdividing, burrowing deep and anchoring down. And soon—like at the beginning of the mangroves’ watery forest—the first sediment will settle, letting you, now the size of a poppyseed, find repose.

In days of extreme heat, T and I take to our small community’s shared pool. T bobs up and down on a foam noodle while I float listlessly on a pool toy cut like a pitless avocado, absently fingering the blue tiles lining the pool’s granite—the granite’s many cracks. 

It has been weeks since we learned of you via two pink lines. Since then, you’ve become a thing shuddering through my bones with sickness. There have been mornings when I was left washed over like someone after a long fever. Clammy but somehow spared, I woke relieved, believing I could know both the thing inside me—now a visible show through my dress’s hand-blocked print—and my body—in its hand-blocked print—again. But that relief—this deliverance—proved temporary.

Today, I am simply scared. 

Of my body. Of my mind. 

Of both’s capacity.

I come to know you through the internet. Through the internet, I also learn how our relationship is to go.

At first, I am told you are non-menacing: the size of a sweet pea or a blueberry, then a prune, lime, lemon, plum. Slowly, you grow round and plush—becoming a soft mango, a ripe papaya. Then, you curl into a delicate ear of corn. Soon, you are a non-threatening gourd: the size of a bright-yellow squash striated yellow.

My body, however, tells a story altogether different. From afar, it seems but a perfect garden—lush and womanly and flowering—but on closer inspection, it proves to be a thing shifting under its own weight. My form starts and stutters under the command of your hormones. You demand I pump my blood harder, transport more sugar sooner, drown myself in my own cortisol. My body’s own hormones counter your quiet clamoring—trying desperately to stave off the increasing demand, the inevitable growth.

You and I: engaged in a constant tug-of-war. 

Rubbing the ridge of my finger over the pool’s rough edge, the lines feel intimate, like those gracing my favorite statue in Key West’s cemetery. The statue: a cherub kneeling in prayer on a vault, spine severed, face an explosion of tiny breaks, one wing gone. 

I feel not unlike those many tiny breaks—diffuse and moving without clear direction. My thoughts thinning—watery, my movements dispersed.

Running my hand through the pool’s water, I feel movement inside my broadness—a tiny fist, then a tiny foot—and somehow wish I hadn’t. At the kick, I drink the stale island air deeply as if through a dull straw, then drop the weight of me under the chlorine’s blue.

I think I am now a body of water in a body of water in a body of water.

That I may be losing where one begins and another ends.

Today, I learn—in addition to what produce shape you now take—that your protective coat will soon begin its unfurring. The cheese-like biofilm that protects your skin, warms your downy hair, is to start its lessening. At the same time, your limbs will thicken—fatten like a baby calf.

I, too, am thickening and am unable to leave our house in the afternoons, given the weather. The news programs say the heat in southern Florida will persist.

It is called extreme. It is called blistering. It is called deadly.

One outlet warns, “This is the beginning.” The beginning of what is not made clear.

In me, the oppressive heat sparks headaches and dizziness, the headaches and dizziness sparking the fear of passing out in public, of being out in public. 

Worried that I’ll be found anesthetized near the White Street grocer’s—the one place I could once safely walk–I find comfort in the sun yellowing through our kitchen’s stained glass window, the circumference of our bed, the width of our peanut-shaped couch—where I now lie sticky and inert.

In Small Bodies of Water, writer Nina Mingya Powles, detailing Shanghai’s smothering summer humidity, shares that in China a colloquial word for “humid” is mèn, which can also mean depressed or bored or even tightly sealed, and whose character is composed of a heart inside a door. A kind of entrapment. 

You are giving me a new lexicon for all kinds of captiveness: a clump on a tongue, a ghost in a throat, an immense cloud in a small tin, the greatest suffocation of feathers, a tiny thimble of fog. A painful density.

In pregnancy, my dreams have become more vivid—my brain processing information and emotions differently, leading to more evocative, more frequent dreams.

Earlier in the week, I dreamed I was in front of a bakery window, selecting from an array of cream puffs and chocolate-dipped cannolis, pink cakes in gold leaf, green macaroons. 

This morning, I woke believing a new hurricane had formed in the Atlantic, spun itself into a godhead, and plunged fully formed into the Florida coast not even a year after the last.

Stuck inside our house again, I shuffle listlessly between bed and couch, couch and bed, and interact with the outside world in the only feasible way: flicking my fingertips against a screen of glass. 

In my feed, a friend shares how Big Oil is responsible for the Canadian fires. 

Another shares the heat index in the UAE, writes he is alarmed.

A third reposts someone else’s post. It is a photograph of two US park rangers at an unknown park visitor center, pointing to a sign that reads 132 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The original poster’s quip: “Grinning dinosaurs posing with the comet.” 

I feel as though I am in a fever dream—the heat keeping us in and us writing about the heat keeping us in. 

From the couch, I hear a branch crack, the hollow of a roll. I look through our back door to see a fallen coconut rocking its vacant, haired body side to side on the patio floor. 

I take a photo of its inertia and share it to the stream. 

It is Week 30. 

You are the size of a cabbage. 

When a midday storm blusters through and cools the air with clouds, I decide it’s our time for a grand escape and ready our plump body. I coat my newly rubbing thighs with Vaseline, then tuck a handful of salted almonds into my purse, pour a large thermos of water, and begin our walk. 

A half-mile away on White Street rests the nondescript Key West Wildlife Center, looking a little worse for wear. Its unornamental entrance sits in relief of a car park and a lawn strewn with iridescent roosters, spotted hens, and skinny pullets. Behind this entrance lies the aviary, and behind the aviary lies the Sonny McCoy Indigenous Park—a park where visitors can walk through a small outcropping of the island’s native hardwoods, watch for migratory birds. 

Vacantly, I drag my favorite leather sandals over the small gravel path to the aviary with its meters-high chain-link cage half-caped in tarps—now unsure how I ended up here, decided on this journey. 

Under the tarps that blow in and out like jellyfish, I can hear the faint sounds of birds being rehabilitated—birds soon to be uncloaked as if by a magician then released back into the wild. 

In my visits, I never see these birds, but the rescue center’s social media accounts assure me they are there: royal terns with wing injuries, herring gulls rescued weak and dehydrated behind parking lots, laughing gulls and frigatebirds pulled from the water, blue pelicans, morning doves, burrowing owls. 

Beside the tarped portion of the aviary are the open cages. Fingering their chain link, I let my eyes wander loosely over the birds ill-equipped for the wild—seeing a little of myself in them. In one cage, roves the solitary great white heron. His movements curious—cautious, his form unequivocally beautiful: heavy yellow bill, lithe body, left claw hooked tightly over a branch.

I watch as the ibis that roams the property freely skirts along the cages. He is excitable—edgy, and when he comes to me and the final cage’s brink, he juts across a strip of loose gravel as though the gravel were a gulley of hot stone. Surprised by the suddenness of the ibis’s movement, the heron twists quickly then freezes, godlike—his head divinely turned. From this angle, I see the real reason for the heron’s caution. In the stead of his right eye there is only a bluish void where sight should be—the right side of his head shelved and ledge-like, clearly damaged. As I watch him, I touch my hand to my head, the side of my cheek. I palm my belly and feel what one can only describe as the presence of absence, or the absence of presence. 

A softer parcel, its void. 

It is then I am reminded to tell T—as I have every day this week—that if I ever say I don’t feel like myself or stop sounding like myself—become a self he no longer knows—that I need him. To speak for me, act for me. 

As if saying it enough will ever be enough. 

Today, at nearly thirty-two weeks, you are sluggish—a flat, low-lying pressure, then an occasional flutter like the tip of a moth trapped in the hull of my cervix. Perhaps it is the heat, or perhaps it is my own fatigue. Regardless, I starfish my body awkwardly across our bed’s tropical fish-festooned coverlet. Careful to protect the rounded flesh holding you, I look up and through our paned back door. 

Lining our patio, there are newly cultivated moth orchids and potted desert plants that no longer grow in a desert. The latter twist angrily toward the sun—golden showers raining down tiny yellow stars in the absence of rain, a desert rose growing thickly, what little water we’ve gotten in the last month stored in its swollen trunk.

Along the back fence, the wings of Chinese fan palms bob luxuriously from their necks—their tips goldened in the sun—and beyond the fence arches a symphony of green. There are shade trees providing various kinds of shade and ornamental plants of varying ornamentation: a chartreuse burst from a Song of India creating a swirl of hypnosis, an ignition of red flaming from a poinciana supplying a necessary pop of color, and palm fronds upon palm fronds delivering the sedating effect of a balmy breeze. 

Key West, an island of fossilized reef—grey and grooved and hard with the markings of organisms that lived thousands of years before—was at one time viewed as undesirable. While adjacent waters were used for boat salvaging and sponge harvesting and salt farming and even turtling, the island’s land—with no fresh water—was seen as a dead thing. Good only for cultivating pretty but useless tropical plants. 

Watching the poinciana reddening in the late summer sun, my heavied middle grows uncomfortable. As I kick my left leg out from under me, I wonder if—when you are here—the same rough deposits will give themselves over to such beauty, if the poincianas will continue to burn orange from the island’s long-dead marine life, long-hardened sediment. 

Will there even be things that have been long dead and things that have been long hardened for you? Will the world still be able to measure time in such length?

My pelvis shudders, and I know you are happy, feeding—sugar from my lunch trickling through your minuscule veins, now pineapple-sized body. Just under thirty-three weeks. 

Around me, the air is soupy. The wind absent. 

I slip my aching joints, shifting sediment into our pool, then—lifting my arms mossy with fat—breaststroke my way across. My fingers close in on drowned wasps and dead moths—their wings and antennae perfectly pressed to the glassy surface. 

Earlier, a poet visiting our island shared photos of Smathers Beach, noting its beauty. She wrote, “The deeper into the day, the greener the water gets.”

What she didn’t write is what the locals know. That the ocean surrounding Key West has reached an unprecedented temperature. That buoys off the coast have consistently been measuring 97 degrees, and under the stress, the reef—just two and a half miles from our home—has begun actively expelling the algae living in its tissue. That a wave of bleaching is commencing and that this wave is one of an undetermined severity. That the coral reef, beginning a kind of dance with death, is predicted to turn ghostly pale—go bone white.

In just over two months, I will expel you, too. Above me, the old skin of a royal palm hangs down feebly from its neck, while flame-red flowers from a poinciana coat the neighbor’s metal roof—frozen in the sun. Nearby, I spot two sets of yellow wings dancing on nothingness: cloudless sulphurs emerging from a bush.

At the pool’s steps, I force my own body to emerge, heave its mass loose from the water. As I do, I look down at my fingers. They are chalk white, like bone.

Even our peanut-shaped couch—once my life raft—feels uncertain. I wake on it to find my heart flipping like a tailless eel.

The palpitations I have been told are normal. My heart rate’s rise to 100 bpm to be expected. All the swelling and headaches and dizziness: known occurrences in a woman whose blood is steeply increasing in its volume. 

I feel oddly vulnerable: beyond the couch rises our home’s feeble walls and beyond our feeble walls is our emptied street and beyond our emptied street is a loose artery to the ocean—an ocean, a journal now reports, whose circulatory currents are on the brink of collapse.

It is cool enough this evening for T and I to walk to Higgs Beach, wade out into the water. 

The ocean—impossibly flat—feels like a warm bath. With no perceivable waves, the sea grass lethargically twists at our feet, limply holds to our ankles.

In the midst of our soak, a girl on an inflatable whale corners us in her curiosity. Asking about the size of my belly. About you.

T swims out a few yards as the precocious little girl rattles on about her summer. Her parents—whom I look for, find—watch on from afar. 

She tells me she is attending a summer camp—that as part of the program they are learning about the Keys National Marine Sanctuary. That the sanctuary is home to North America’s only coral barrier reef but also sea beds and also mangrove-protected islands and also six thousand species of life. Her list of species is long: stony corals and sponges and jellyfish, a syllabary of anemones, a spectrum of snails, an alphabet of crabs.

She tells me she loves mangroves, especially our red mangrove—emphasizing our. And then she asks me if I know. When she does, I look confused. Visibly flustered, she asks me again if I know, then goes on to fill in the blanks: if it wasn’t for the mangroves, our four-by-two-mile island would cease to exist. 

I look to the horizon line—the purple-pink water a mirror of a mirror of the now cotton-candy sky—and think of you rooting in me, rooting down in my wet and soil. What carrying you means for my own existence.

It is my last week on the island before I travel north for your birth—the island’s hospital being too tiny, of too limited means—and my belly is globe-like and hard, my uterus—according to my app—bigger than a soccer ball. 

We wait till the sun sets to begin our walk to my favorite part of the island and the highest point at eighteen feet above sea level: the Key West cemetery. Through the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates, the wind flutters, knocking the leaves of a carrotwood, rushing a row of royal palms. 

I usually come to this place alone, to take photos of the artifacts: the odd American flag placed in a T.J.Maxx vase toppled over, Mardi Gras beads dripping down the neck of a wicked-looking angel, a sole Vietnam Vet baseball cap hanging limply from a post. Fragmented memory, remnants of living.

Today, I notice only evidence of life. 

An American ermine shears the tall, uncut grass—its tiny white wings pinpricked black. Brown anoles and curly-tailed lizards with their spiraled ends scurry over the crushed bellies of vaults.

At one grave, a mother hen shakes grain from a patch of sorghum, as four pullets stampede over to take part in the carnage.

Walking from site to site, T and I carefully read the plaques and headstones, still flirting with your future name. As we move, so does the wind, making a sound like shimmer through the towering palms. Eventually, we stop near my favorite kneeling cherub. The one with the severed spine, a mess of fault lines running the length of her cheek.

Tracing the estuaries of stone with my eyes, I feel my chest quake, my cotton T-shirt grow wet. I look down and find it dappled in colostrum, in milk—the cracks in me seemingly insignificant, until you asked me to river all at once.

I fold my elbows over my shirt, then—letting the island air whip freely round my pelvis, its big careening—I try on the many ways I can describe the feeling to you. For you. 

Inside me: mangrove roots and rougher deposits, their turning over.

Inside me: a body of water in a body of water.

Inside me: a self and that self somehow loosening into entirety. Like an ocean.

Or this: an outsized heart, and that heart splintering a door.

Published May 19th, 2024