Alice Was Going Down To The Beach for a Swim
a short story
Our writer Maja Milanovic looked at Eva Terez’s photographs and the first sentence of her short story “Alice Was Going Down To The Beach for a Swim” popped up. She decided to trust her intuition and write it down. That image led to another and another, and she ended up writing a story that she didn’t even know was hiding inside of her. If you are a regular or if you have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art welcome. This year, we hope that our stories and the artists that we present will inspire you to start your own creative journeys, and our house team of writers will join you on this ride. If you like Maja’s story, take a moment to let us know, share it with your friends or why not subscribe?
“Haven’t you heard about the African sun?”
Alice looked up to where the voice was coming from but instead of a face she encountered a disorienting bright white light. The sun was at its noon position and it was piercing through the thin ozone layer. She couldn’t stand the feeling of being blinded, so she looked down at her feet. Her toes were perfectly manicured, but in the ultraviolet light they looked like they got gangrene.
When the Server stood in front of the sun to block it, the ambassador’s wife dared to look up again. His beautiful white teeth grinned down at her.
‘Were they really so white?’ she wondered. ‘Or was it the play between the light and the shadows that enhanced their beauty?’
At the same time, he kept on smiling because he knew her species all too well. She was just one of the many tourists that came daily to the resort to heal. However, never encountering the strong sun before, they quickly started complaining: the chairs were too uncomfortable, the staff was too slow, their ailments became worse immediately ….. therefore, he liked to remind them that the sun in Africa is stronger than where they came from, and that is the reason why their skin became too tight for their souls.
The tall young man offered his hand, so that she could get up from the sun lounger. She hang onto this friendly stranger’s arm as if hanging onto dear life as he led her away from the blinding light. For a few seconds, she couldn’t see a thing, a feeling all that familiar, a feeling that she couldn’t shake out of her body. A feeling she tried to escape by coming all the way here. It’s just that the first time, it wasn’t bright, the blindness … it was pitch dark.
It happened just a month earlier in the cold North, where she took up residence after years of living an expat life. The adjustment to a life with roots in one place wasn’t easy for her. Following her husband around the world had its privileges, and coming back “home,” the place of her husband’s birth, felt meaningless. It was a place where the birds and bees and humans came to life in the short-lived spring and summer months, and everyone and everything died in the long autumn and winter period. With no continuity, it was hard to make connections if one didn’t previously attend a school or university in the city. And yet, progress in life, careers, one’s social life, all were based on those childhood liaisons, so she did what she had to, she went back to school and enrolled in a language class.
In her middle age, Alice found herself surrounded by young refugees that overwhelmed Europe. They spent days and nights on foot, boats, fighting the police of different nations on the old continent. The lucky ones came by plane, flushed their documents down the toilets at the arriving airports and sought asylum. And just like Alice, none of them had any previous school friendships in this new land.
The class was vibrant with different languages filling the air and with the first broken attempts to speak the new language of freedom.
‘The mental road to get to a better life might prove to be even longer than the one that got them to this classroom,’ Alice thought on her second day.
In the hallways, in the breaks between lessons, a lot of them stuck to their own kind, the familiar patterns of speech and traditions. One could hear them laughing, at times there were also fights and tears. To a Northerner they might’ve all looked the same, but within their religion there were different groups, some countries were better than others, they were not all equal.
Alice sat on the side observing silently. If she was an expat in their countries, she would’ve volunteered to help them. Being of service gave her life meaning as her own dreams, those of occupying the stages of the world opera houses, were long left behind. She was so soft spoken, no one would believe that in her petite body a soprano was hiding. When she didn’t volunteer, she swam. On her first day in every country where she lived, she found a swimming pool or a beach. Submersed in water, she felt as if she was living on another more nourishing planet. But in this new classroom, she understood that it’s best to sit on the side and mind her own business in order not to offend anyone. She took her Louise Vutton leather bag from the top of the desk and put it on her knees away from everyone’s eyes.
It was 30 degrees outside on the day of her blindness. The city was buzzing with talk of the heat wave. In her own life experience, heat waves were declared when the temperature rose to 40. Nevertheless, she wore light linen trousers and a V-neck T-shirt. In her hands, she carried a colorful bouquet of fresh summer flowers and an oversized teddy bear. Samira, a young women from a country far away, whom she met in class just gave birth. The two were drawn to each other immediately after that first day when they serendipitously sat next to each other: one fifty years old, the other barely twenty two.
With the busy life she and her husband led, Alice never had children of her own. For a while, it hurt even though she always told herself that the world is full of children that needed her help. However, that thought really only settled in when menopause knocked on her door delivering her reproductive machine’s expiration date. Unlike most others in their class, Samira came to the North by plane, married to a boy whom she met on her wedding day. She was humble, strictly observing Ramadan, covered her hair. Many of the other young women took off their hijabs the minute they stepped onto the frozen Northern land and prodded Samira to do the same. She looked up to Alice with her beautiful kohl lined eyes, she looked up seeking understanding. During Ramadan, when her hunger was so enormous and fasting has proved to be challenging, Samira found out that she was four months pregnant. It was then that Alice found meaning again.
The next few months, the two navigated the pregnancy system of the North together. With a lack of support from her mother, grandmothers and aunties who lived far away, Samira was grateful for the help. And Alice made sure that the girl took her vitamins, ate the rainbow of fruits and vegetables, drank her fluids and that she wasn’t too stressed with the fact that she lived in a different culture that had different ideas about childbearing. So, when on July 26th the news of the baby’s birth showed up on her phone screen, Alice jumped into action.
When she arrived to the hospital, there was a whole procedure that she had to go through before entering. The whole world was recently affected by a virus that spread with an unprecedented speed, and the protocol was still in place. Only family could come in. She was lucky that her husband had those school connections that helped her come inside. Instead of going to the floor where the young mom was resting, she was sent to the waiting room, in the basement. She took one look around the dimmed space and saw that many of the people waiting were sick. A few wore face masks. Most were glued to their phone or an iPad.
The air was stifling, the smell of ammoniac coming from the newly washed floor crept up her nose.
‘If it was 35 outside, without an air conditioner as the North didn’t usually install them due to temperatures rarely being so high, it had to be 40 plus in the room.’
She broke into a cold sweat. She was nervously looking towards the door where Samira and the baby were supposed to arrive any minute, then at her watch. It was just after noon. She opened her LV bag and searched for a bottle of water. But in the excitement that she was going to meet the baby, Alice didn’t think of herself. She tried to inhale as much oxygen as she could, but it felt as all of it was sucked out of the room. She heard the door open, she turned to see if it was the baby girl, but a black curtain fell in front of her eyes. For a second, she breathed as if there was no tomorrow, and then she went blind.
A silent panic ensued.
Alice’s breath became shallower with every long second that passed by, her face mask triggered gagging. With urgency, she hold onto the wall and started walking towards the exit, her perfectly manicured nails leaving a scratch on the cheap wall plaster. She had to get out! Her steps followed the beats of her heart that sped like a heart of a marathon runner. CRASH! She ran into the metal cart in the hallway. The pain brought her back into her body for a second. Except for her eyesight, she has been neglecting her other four senses. Out of habit, she closed her eyes. The blackness didn’t change, but she detected the sound of the elevator, which gave her a sense of direction. The toxic smell in the hallways suddenly became so strong, her nose started burning.
It took five minutes, which felt like an eternity, to come back to the entrance of the hospital. She heard footsteps running, some chatter coming far away. Giggles. The mechanic sounds of the door opening and closing. A whiff of outside air came her way, so she turned towards it and walked straight out onto the street.
Alice couldn’t see the pedestrians that bumped into her body. Since she moved to the North, people were oblivious of her. They were not curious where does she come from or what was she doing here. They were just looking straight ahead, with their cafe lattes in their hands, rushing to work. The younger generation in this rich country disturbed her even more. Raised by daycares and absent working parents, they walked down the streets starring at their phones and iPads; even during diners in restaurants, they were irradiated with screens.
These kids turned into teenagers who walked with VR goggles on their noses. The sidewalk turned into an enhanced reality where suddenly from behind a traffic light or a kiosk a Pokemon-kind-of-creature would jump out and greet them … sometimes gave them an energy drink or coffee … all they had to do was just extend their hand. They got rewarded just for walking from point A to point B, but the minute they accepted the free gifts, money was spent. And if they were monthly subscribers to the VR creators, it meant that they led sort of an all inclusive enhanced daily life.
The warm air was thick, but away from the hospital’s basement, she felt a rush of fresh air come up her nose. The black curtain lifted as fast as it went down revealing a busy summer scene in the middle of town. She doesn’t know what came over her, but she ripped off the face mask from her face and shrieked, her soprano voice came out of hiding.
The helpful Server led Alice to a comfortable chair on the balcony with a view of the Red Sea. After her new psychologist recommended that she should go to a resort, she immediately bought her ticket and hopped on a plane leaving her husband to his school friends back in the North, and Samira to her baby. Language lessons also needed to wait. Through the window that was protecting her from the sun, she looked at the beautiful sea. As the Server was preparing to connect her to the oxygen tank, she quickly took a dollar or two from her leather bag to tip him as she knew …
… the minute she inhaled the oxygen bubbles, she would slip into a land where nothing mattered. She leaned back into her recliner and smiled as the happy Server took her money and went away. She looked at the sea, and she was finally blinded in a good way, by its beauty. Everything was sparkling blue. The world and its news just had to wait because once the oxygen tank was empty …
… Alice was going down to the beach for a swim.
