The Weighted Line

Victoria Buitron

As seashells crumble in the sand underneath her feet, my mother grabs the scraps left behind by others. There are creased bottles, skinny bottle caps, lime floss picks, broken sporks, diapers, makeup-sweated masks. She repeats the same words in Spanish every time she finds a new object: Es que no entiendo. I want to ask her what she doesn't understand, but I know that sentence cloaks the curse words in her mind. When I look up from my book, I see her getting close to a blob on the floor. A jellyfish blob. I let out a scream, primal, to stop her in her tracks, and she does. Her right arm is out, just a foot away from it, waiting for my permission. Her eyes are more afraid of me than it. When I look again, I make out what it really is. Balloons once in the shape of hearts that look like pummeled semicircles. There are five balloons, two red hearts that look less tired than the bigger translucent ones they are trapped in—the outer ones give off a rainbow sheen when struck by the sun. Oh, sorry, thought it was something else. She grabs the cherry-colored ribbon tied to the limp bouquet of balloons. They must have traveled from far away. Maybe they were tied to a child's left wrist like my mother used to insist on doing to me when I was a kid. She looped the ribbon around my arm, making sure it wouldn't leave a mark, that it wouldn't cut off circulation, but that it stayed on me—my body the weighted line. Sometimes I asked to hold the ribbon in my hand. It'll fly away when you get distracted. She was always right. We’d both look up at its eventual flight, higher and higher until its form became a dot. Traversing the neighborhood, falling on a tree, cartwheeling onto a roof or slithering into a backyard like perpetual leaves. Never thinking it could hurt something midair or post-landing. My mother can't fit anything else in the garbage bag she brought, and we have nothing to puncture the floaty hearts with. She walks to the closest garbage can, which is so far she becomes a speck. When she returns, I give her rubbing alcohol, and a beer, then we pass the time chismeando, listening to music, reading books. We hope the neighbors along this strip of beach take their trash with them. That a sudden wind doesn't blow plastic away for birds and critters to feast on. I sit with her waiting for the sun to strike and for the cue to wade into the ocean. Sometimes her ritual is the size of a grain of sand, sometimes it’s as colossal as cresting waves pulling us under—saltwater instead of wind, bodies instead of faux hearts.