THE WORLD BETWEEN BLINKS IS ALWAYS THERE.
It is everywhere and it is nowhere.
It is in every wreck, every abandoned lot, every city block, every scraggly patch of woods. It’s the place you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, reflected in rain puddles and car windows. Blink. There and gone. Shoved just out of the streetlight’s reach.
People see it every day, but they rarely pay attention. The grown-ups are too busy doing grown-up things – like ordering coffee or picking up dry cleaning – to stop and look, really look. Most kids are too distracted to examine it for long. They see the boarded windows and the DANGER: KEEP OUT sign posted by the entrance, and they shrug and go on with their lives.
Most kids.
But there are those who pause a little longer. The daydreamers – kids with burrs on their socks, who name sticks after legendary swords and call out the names of lost cities in their sleep.
They stare into the dark places: blink, blink.
They see.
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Marisol
Marisol loved the air around the ocean.
It smelled mostly of salt, yes, but there were so many other things happening inside it too. Sunscreen and crying seagulls and driftwood discoveries and waves washing castles back into sand. One breath held all of this.
When Marisol was younger, she used to think that’s why her lungs felt so crowded whenever her family traveled to South Carolina, but now she knew the reason was more scientific. Something to do with altitude. La Paz, her home city in Bolivia, was surrounded by mountains, and Folly Beach was, well – a beach.
Every summer when Marisol Contreras Beruna went to her grandmother’s house, her body had to adjust. This summer, the very first one after Nana’s death, her heart was a big part of that equation.
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