Everything seemed smaller and disappointing.

  She had that tendency to expect the great from the mundane, the gold from blemished copper.

  The sea behind those old, tired brown eyes could be cut in half. She saw only what she wanted, and half the time it was the silhouette of a young girl, joyously optimistic to the point of mania, about a journey she could not remember ever taking.

  This, the journey that takes all.

  The journey across seas is nothing but blind faith until one recognizes that the sea has no end.

  If she opened her mouth to speak, she might have told him, saved him from further effort; however, where they were, all effort had already been spent. The things they did now were mere residual effects of lives lived in rapid succession.

  Everything around her muted, the stain after bloodletting.

  No more feeling having felt all of it come to pass.

  “I love you,” meant half as much after her breath had been taken away. The half that remained holds on by a string. The eyes shut themselves, already tired and bored.

  Suppressed sigh. The denial is numbness, a temporary numbness, until she, too, gives in and recognizes the source, the owner of the body she borrowed.

  “I should think not.”

  HIS TURN

  The sun wouldn’t stay even if it could. It teased him with the wonder of one clear direction until it left only the final few traces of light outlining the gentle waves, the ripple in the calm warm sea. Those young, eager eyes held back tears but the clouds that cast the sun out of this scene had already planned to do all the crying. First droplets could be seen dotting the ocean’s surface.

  Surface turned murky, upsetting the balance, screaming out different voices, all of which, sounding together, from his ears could only sound like an incoming storm.

  Shivering, he wanted to warn her, wanted to declare what would soon become a futile trek into treacherous waters. Where words should have saved, they splintered away. What he wanted to say had little to do with what could be said.

  Everything had to do with the rainstorm.

  The wind, the thunder, the waves crashing against the side of the coffin, spoke for the one part of him that needed to speak.

  And yet he still rowed. He fought back what he should have felt. He forced back everything that might show weakness.

  He turned a blind eye to what he looked like.

  He could nearly see through the young girlish features to the inside of the coffin. He looked past the blonde, shoulder-length hair and paid no attention to how effortless it was to tie the hair into two perfect ponytails.

  Over his shoulder, he saw not what should have been an unfamiliar face but rather her in fear, her drowning in the rainstorm. Over his shoulder, he wanted to warn her of the water pooling ankle-deep.

  The feverish rowing continued until the oar wanted nothing more. It couldn’t have survived the storm and neither could they if they hadn’t already succumbed to prior demise.

  Swallowing whole mouthfuls of rainwater did very little to displace doubt. He opened his mouth, wheezing out voiceless shouts, gesturing at her to help keep the coffin afloat.

  It was taking on too much water way too quickly.

  The storm worsened before it got any better.

  Downpour reflected his every dying wish to have saved her from this demise. If he had said it before his last breaths, he might have been able to apologize.

  It felt like the perfect moment, seeing her there, slumped over; the heavy rains pulled her into that obese belly. Her shape seemed to lose all definition. In the darkness of the storm, she looked like a blotch that he couldn’t quite reach.

  Every attempt to get closer ended with a wave pushing the side of the coffin, the storm pushing him back.

  Falling to one side, broken oar held in his hands, he let the splintered wood go, watched the broken pieces float toward her.

  The rain was only rain until it became the only reason to keep them apart.

  Wordlessly he watched the water rise and the coffin lower.

  He was never any closer to giving in as he was right now.

  Soon, he thought, the coffin would sink. They would have to swim. Maybe, he worried that he wouldn’t know how to swim when the time came. Maybe he’d sink to the bottom.

  Who would sink first?

  Him or her?

  HER TURN

  The rain stopped before she could notice that it had rained at all. When she stood up, the water in the coffin drained. Where she sat back down, the fabric never really dried.

  She yawned.

  Heavy eyelids she could not keep from closing. There, where he had always stood with some degree of confidence, she saw only the bluish-grey of a sky tired and dull.

  Ready for whatever came next.

  Eyes closed.

  Eyes once again open. A yawn she could feel rising from somewhere deep within this aged body.

  Looming threat being that the effort to keep those eyelids open lost against the will to keep them closed.

  Blame… but who could she really blame?

  She stepped over the same boundaries as he did. She barreled over the dangerous marks, blotted out the extensive disclaimers; the reach for demise outweighed the ridicule for having risked it all for just a taste.

  “I could have been anything.”

  It was a whisper, always a whisper.

  She might have been someone.

  She could have been someone to die for.

  Certainly she did not die alone. He was there the same way he was there now, even though she couldn’t see him, he was there. Heavy eyelids concealed the fact that he fell into the water. He choked but was saved; she drained the coffin just in time.

  He crawled toward her and sat to her right.

  Heavy eyelids and dearly felt neglect. He might have tried to hold onto her; she might have reciprocated, but that’s the stuff of different stories, affection saved for the books that detail relationships set in the present tense.

  A dead relationship carries on like a haunting, repeating the best far less than repeating the worst of times.

  Eyes open, she leaned forward, looking down at those tattered shoes, disproportionate body acting as the simplest indication of neglected health. Mirror that with the quickest glimpse of what he looked like.

  “She was just a simple, jaded girl.”

  Just cause for tired eyelids.

  Eyes closed.

  If she had a heartbeat, if she needed to inhale, this would have been where she sighed, matched by the skipping of her heart. Enough of a skip and a sigh to be something of a reminder that the decision could be as simple as the flick of a light switch.

  But to make this all possible, she needed to remain where she was, not tampering with a single thing.

  That was his role.

  She would sit until sitting no longer matched the momentum of the sea. The current had its way, each wave pushing and pulling, would-be directionless when it was clearly wind-swept intent. The tether was not yet severed between where they had been and where they would soon go.

  She could feel sleep getting closer, the kind of sleep only the dead could experience.

  HIS TURN

  Rowing without oar, his arms were too frail and yet, because the sun, once again, met him in the middle, rays shone from directly above him, heating his skin, causing the little borrowed body to sweat and ache. He forced the most from each lean, felt arm dislodging from its socket.

  He wasn’t just rowing for himself. He rowed for two.

  He rowed for the relationship he would sooner cease to be than to lose. There’s some truth to that statement. The growing rumor was that it wasn’t so much a one-sided effort. More like it seems right to believe that it was mutual.

  Believe what you want to believe. It was a mutual effort in the appeal of never losing interest.

  In his mind there was only her.

  In hers, he liked to think he sat among her favorites. If confidence rang high, he’d go so far as to say he was her reason to live. He was her reason to wake up in the morning.

  In the very least, it was true for him, clear of the sort of affection he had always felt for her.

  Waking up was so much easier if he knew she’d be there, the first thing he’d see.

  And though he couldn’t be sure of where they were, or how they’d get out of this, he would at least make sure she was safe.

  If this body were a body in the physical sense, it would have broken into pieces during the hundredth attempt to fight the current. However calm it now was, the sun proved to be far worse than any rain.

  When he couldn’t seem to picture anything—nothing to see behind the sun’s glare, nothing to see on all sides of the horizon—he made up for in voice. Odd how the words arrived only when he had no other choice, when he had no clear place for them.

  “Hey now.”

  He paddled with the left arm.

  That might be pain shooting up his spine, maybe.

  “What I was going to say was…”

  And he held onto those words, barely able to wrap his thin fingers around more than two at a time, and drowned them in the water, the water so warm.

  Still the waves, the silent sea.

  For the first but definitely not the last time, he looked, and really looked, at the body that he hadn’t realized he borrowed.

  “Yes” followed by “No” followed by another “Yes.”

  Pink shirt on grey pants.

  What the hell.

  And…

  “That might not work for the best.”

  Sweat dripped down his brow. Smell the sweat, the stench in no way the way his body should smell.

  These eyes, these lips, this tongue couldn’t be his.

  How could it only begin to register now?

  And still, for this to work, he couldn’t see himself in the water, even when he freely chose to look into the water, hoping to see a reflection. He couldn’t kiss her because she wasn’t the same either. He couldn’t taste the sweat on his forearm without thinking that he had abandoned who he was for the role of an imposter, a role he hadn’t desired. Not even once.

  That sort of bubbling confusion could only be fought by physical exertion. Default to the imperative, the lone need.

  Because he couldn’t figure out where they were, it had to be dangerous waters. He half-expected to see enemy ships, sharks circling their little bit of help, this… coffin?

  “This,” what he chose not to believe was a coffin.

  Words rushed him now.

  “The park is still open.”

  Drowned the sentence with his frantic paddling, the skin on his arms wrinkling from saltwater.

  “The squirrel we like needs to be fed.”

  Whose words were these? He looked over his shoulder just in time to see her neck snap to one side.

  If she wasn’t well, how could he be any better?

  HER TURN

  Because her neck snapped in such a way that couldn’t be anything but the final snap, the eyelids remained shut even as she tried to look, tried to give him her best sort of encouraging look.

  Senses haven’t completely failed:

  She could still hear him and everything he said. How couldn’t she hear that voice so loud, shrill, and terrified?

  As her neck snapped, she gave in.

  She gave up what she had fought without reason to keep. She no longer fought the basics. She no longer had reason to feel so numb and ineffectual.

  It all had to do with denial. It had everything to do with what she felt was her fault.

  The disease grabbed her as she reached in to take risk on full-throttle. Senselessly the source of their demise wouldn’t return to her. Everything before seeing her hand reach into a dark expanse of undefined space, she had nothing but him to fill the blankness that now blotted out her memories.

  A new worry boiled in that potbelly of hers.

  She couldn’t move.

  Her neck had snapped. Could she remember?

  She couldn’t move because she knew what this meant.

  She wanted, at this very moment, even if it was in that gruff male voice, to tell him what she had told him more than anything else. She wanted to say, “I love you.”

  Maybe it would sound wrong. Maybe it would fall flat upon her telling him, but then she would lean in, turning to the next sense, the sense of touch, and she would touch lips.

  Her chapped, almost bleeding lips, touched his young red lips. Just imagine:

  That body, the body that he borrowed. The body of someone she can almost remember, much like the body she borrowed seemed so familiar. But not yet.

  For her to believe that her neck was really cracked and broken, none of this needed to work.

  No lips touching.

  No “I love you” declared.

  For it to work, she needed to float in the only sort of sleep those floating toward demise could experience. It was the sort of sleep deemed half coma and half defeat.

  It was a brand of sleep that wafted with no breeze, weighed down in the mild pain of dark, sunburned skin.

  It was the sort of sleep that only she would experience.

  She slept for the full-effect, until senses rose sharply up her spine and it was clear that dead bodies feed on dead thoughts; any pain or pleasure could only be drawn from the filed away mindset called the “past.”

  Anything to be said or spoken had already been said.

  By the look of the borrowed body, she was a middle-aged man, career-doomed and desperate for legacy.

  HIS TURN

  Those young impressionable eyes were incapable of holding back what he saw: Vacant seas, hidden depths, and the reflection cast on the calm waters, the one that eluded him strictly because he had wanted it to remain elusive. Blue eyes that saw for a dozen years, little more than that, could not blot out what he now knew, what he distantly held as true.

  Look and, indeed, he looked.

  Really looked, and what he gave was similar to what she gave. It would be right to say that he gave it all but nothing about what happens between these book covers is even remotely close to “right.” Him and her, a man that in his giving up, at least as much as is needed to admit that his body isn’t his, his body borrowed much like his breath ceases to exist, his name registered both here on the page and in his memory at the same time.

  He couldn’t remember.

  He couldn’t remember his name.

  Perhaps he could remember if he tried to give a little bit more about himself but by all accounts it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to give much more if the name is as hopeless as the words he cannot help but speak.

  This body of his, it looked so familiar.

  “I know you.”

  Three words dripped down those red lips, lips that should have never been his. Not with the kind of mouth he had, known to sprinkle language better left unsaid. Everything he said never really stained his white teeth, but a younger, more innocent body like this might turn into a monster based on his tendency to break free and tempt disaster. It’s why he got along so well with her.

  Tempting a disease, it grabbed him as much as it grabbed her. Doubt is quite similar to denial as long as he desired something other than this. But enough about desire.

  Desire is what got him here. Desire is what got her to dare in the first place. Enough about that.

  For this to work, he needed to be aware. For this to really work, he needed to lower his face near the water and stare at what stared back at him. Various faces, gestures formed in hopes of turning that face into a frown. For this to work, he needed to feel empty. No matter what face he made, what looked back at him failed to look how he wanted it to look.

  Mouth open, jaw hanging, he watched as a grin formed.

  What was there to smile about?

  By the look of the borrowed body, he was a girl, a life as-of-yet to design, a life already in decline.

  HER TURN

  She yawned and it was a yawn that shook free the very fact that, broken neck or not, she could move this body beyond any clear reason. She could crack the spine in five places. Bend an arm back in the wrong direction. She turned her neck one hundred and eighty degrees, stopping only when she saw him.

  He could be found on the other side of the coffin, head hanging over the edge, dipped in as if drowning were still a probable means of demise.

  Demise had passed them.

  Past demise there is no clear direction, not if you are here, and hold on to what cannot be rightfully named.

  At least not right now, though it might be obvious, in the grander scene, the scenario in its entirety, what must happen to see anything distinct on the horizon, to reach landfall.

  So she was a middle-aged man.

  So what?

  Wishing it could have been that easy to dismiss.

  Yet when she really looked at him, she saw past the young girl staring back with that grin across her face, with the opposite of what he must have felt; she saw through the borrowed body and it was enough for her to sit up, move her own borrowed body in a way that it hadn’t been moved in some time.

  She sat forward, elbows on knees, and coughed. Or at least tried to cough.

  The not coughing got his attention. She watched as he skipped toward her, tilting the entire coffin, nearly flipping it over. Maybe he wanted to breathe out, exhale, emphasizing that he was relieved, but instead jaw hung heavy when the breath did not come. Since he tried, her try couldn’t end in any other way than what she had witnessed.

  She held her belly like a newborn child. Cradling it dearly, she looked around as he closed his eyes, hopeful and youthful despite what little could be seen.

  He sat and she sat because what else could they do but sit side-by-side and stare out toward the ocean turning colors, red, green, orange, than black, before returning to blue? All colors in the spectrum but the one color they liked best. The one they would never admit, which is why they sit and why they continued to sit as day turned into night, night back into day, with the sun never lowering, not even once.