Like Bursting Jellyfish Across the Neon Sea

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Alexandra McAnarney

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When the first bomb goes off it’s far enough away from home that it’s easy to confuse for a stray thunder burst. 

The girl, who lies awake as she does most nights since she arrived back in the capital city with the mother, hears it, bites the inside of her cheeks, and says nothing.

She stares at the starkness of the room. Lines of pulsing halogen light from a bank sign next door filter through the high windows. They print their glowing white marks against the oak-paneled bedroom walls like a painted accusation. 

The girl rubs her sleep crusted eyes and throws her water lily printed sheets over her head.  The harsh glow of the bank sign, the shadowy movements of palm trees strafing across the zinc roof, the monitoring eyes skipping on the smoke-choked streets, all threaten to burst her room open and drag her outside.

The girl burrows deeper into the bed sheets and squeezes her tears away. She pretends she’s swimming at the bottom of one of Monet’s dark blue ponds, where silence blooms like algae, surrounded by the green stems of pads, lilies, and frog legs.  She pretends she is a wiggling carp, iridescent and big-mouthed, able to swallow worlds before they can swallow her.

A second bomb interrupts her story. This time the sound is more defined. 

This means an advance.  

Deeper and deeper, the girl swims. But fear wins and she can no longer stay in her pond.

 “Mami?” She calls out in a dry, thin voice.

In less than a minute, the mother walks into the room, “Hey, baby, hey,” the mother clicks on the lamp on the nightstand and sits next to her on the bed. She scoops the girl out of her bedsheet pond, “Is everything ok?”

“What’s that noise?” The girl asks.

“It’s just fireworks from another Christmas party that’s very far away, sweetie. Probably behind the mountain. You wouldn’t even be able to see them,” The mother strokes the girl’s cheek and pulls her in tightly to her chest. The girl breathes in the mother’s Nivea face cream, detergent, and lavender oil. 

“Why aren’t we ever invited?” The girl asks, pulling her head back annoyed.

“You can’t always expect to be friends with everyone,” The mother responds and stares with tired eyes at the dusty tile floor.

Before the girl can comment on how sad and rude that sounds, she hears an imperious and metonymic thump, thump, thump, come down the hallway. 

The bedroom door swings open and the grandmother walks in, silver-headed cane drumming along like a war call. She plops down heavily on the opposite side of the mother, leaving the girl sandwiched tightly in the middle.

“They’re calling it on the radio. They’ll be here by dawn. I knew it was a bad idea for you two to come back,” she says wearily.

“Well, we’re here,” the mother looks down at the girl, who remains unmoving, “So don’t ask for so much from her.”

“This is what this country is. Why hide it from her?” The grandmother licks her lips, “Is there any water here?”

 
The girl shakes her head, slowly, trying not to move or interrupt the two women.

“How many times have I told you? You’re supposed to fill the jug every night before bed, girl. Lord, I’m parched,” the grandmother smacks her dry gums. 

The girl notices that she is not wearing her dentures, a fact which makes her stomach spasm. The grandmother always wears her dentures around other people, including family. 

“I could go into the kitchen before the power dies,” the mother offers, reluctantly.

“Out of the question,” the grandmother says huffily, “We should have reinforced the back patio gate after the first time they broke in and ransacked the pantry. Anyone might be in there, waiting in the dark. They’re like rats, especially when they’re cornered.”

The girl looks down at her hands and out into the darkness of her own room and mumbles, “I don’t like this story.”

“You think it’s a story?” the grandmother grunts, “Grow up.”

A third bomb goes off. A sonar whirlwind of bursting glass and car alarms float on a raging backdraft that blasts across the black asphalt outside their building. 

From the bedroom, the impact of the destruction is muffled. But the grandmother, who is no stranger to the damage of armed conflict, winces and clutches her cane close to her chest like a musket.

“You know she doesn’t mean it,” the mother leans in and whispers, “Abue just finds this all a little too familiar.”

The girl looks questioningly at the mother, but a rolling blackout interrupts her mother’s apology. 

Absolute darkness cloaks the city and the three women for another night. The grandmother sighs so heavily that she makes the bed springs squeak, “Looks like no water until tomorrow,” she mutters. But she catches herself before she can say if we’re still here to care.

The girl begins to whimper but checks herself. The mother, who notices, stands up from the bed. Rummaging in the dark, she asks the girl, “Where did you put Bebe?”

The girl doesn’t immediately respond to the whereabouts of her stuffed shark. She’s been trying real hard to not need him because she’s tired of feeling weak and small, “He’s around,” she says, noncommittal, “Maybe the closet.”

“What? Since when?” the mother asks, surprised and a little hurt. Bebe the shark was the first thing the mother lay next to the girl when she was born. The girl was so tiny when she first came out of the womb that she was able to cling to all of Bebe like a pink remora.

The girl looks at the grandmother, afraid. While looking at the oak-paneled walls, she replies with a quivering voice, “I don’t know.”

The grandmother looks down and blinks. She grasps the girl’s hand in some semblance of an apology, “Try the drawer.”

It’s impossible to see in the dark. All the girl can hear is the mother moving, shuffling, pushing, straining, until she calls out in victory. “Here he is!”

She throws the stuffed shark at the girl, who immediately wraps her arms around him. 

“Nobody puts Bebe in a drawer,” the mother says, jokingly referencing their favorite pirated VHS, “Or the candles for that matter,” She lays them on the nightstand.  With careful but firm hands, the mother places one in the iron candle holder saturated in white wax next to the girl’s bed. 

In the flickering candlelight, their shadows become broad smudges, like blast residue against a concrete wall. The girl shudders.

The mother gives the grandmother a pointed glance, mouthing the words Just. Try. The grandmother smooths the girl’s curls.

When a fourth bomb goes off, slightly further than the third, it’s followed by a pop, pop, pop sound.

“What’s that?” The girl asks, alarmed.

“Oh that?” The grandmother responds in a forced, teasing tone, “Those are just really big bubbles. When you can afford it you can blow enormous, glowing balls that pop in cover everyone in a warm, soapy film.”

“That’s stupid,” the girl replies with suspicion.

The sound is followed by a faint rat-tat-tat-tat-tat then a second, closer and more bone rattling RAT TAT TAT from the street outside the bedroom.

The mother tightens her arm around the girl’s chest, “Thank god for concrete walls and high windows,” she whispers, feeling a creeping dread lap at her feet and knees like the cold waves of the Pacific.

The grandmother locks her grip on the girl’s hand, “That’ll only get you so far,” she mutters to herself.

Outside the sound of machine gunfire continues. The girl tries to shake both women off, “What? What’s going on?”

The grandmother loosens her grip. In the dark, the girl can tell she is choosing her words wisely.

 “That,” the grandmother says carefully, “Is a very fat man farting.”

“What?” say the mother and the girl in synchronized, head-swiveling shock.

“Well yes,” the grandmother replies, sitting up straight in the bed with feigned haughtiness, “Haven’t you ever eaten all of your frijoles and just–” the grandmother presses her twisted hands to her lips. her palms dig into her mouth, opens her green eyes wide, and blows the loudest raspberry the girl has ever heard.

 “PHBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBT.”

The girl giggles. So does the mother.  

The grandmother never farts. Let alone make fart noises.

“You try it,” the grandmother says.

The girl tries but laughs, “I can’t.”

The mother looks at the grandmother and winks at the girl, “PHHHTHTHTHTHTHTHTH”

The little girl cackles and tries it.

They continue making fart noises to outpace the machine gun fire in the street and they start to believe that their spasmodic laughter is what makes the room shake.

Then the girl stops laughing. Through the slats of the high windows, the girl sees a burst of light that sweeps through the night sky like a delicate tendril reaching for the stars.

“That looks like fireworks!” the girl exclaims, “I want to see the fireworks.”

“You can’t honey,” the mother says nervously, “You can’t be close to any windows or the outside right now.”

“But if it’s a party, then there’s fireworks, unless you’re lying to me,” the girl says, “Let me see them.”

The mother doesn’t respond. The silence in the room grows like a dark explosion moving in slow motion

Until the grandmother jocularly ripples through the tension by asking the girl, “What do you know about jellyfish?” 

The girl doesn’t know anything about jellyfish yet. In her firework-less spite she responds acidly, “They’re gross and I hate them.”

The grandmother leans in and chides, “There’s a lot of things out there that are gross and that you think you hate. Do you know anything about them?”

The girl shakes her head.

“Ok. Jellyfish. They’ve been around for millions of years,” the grandmother says, “They bob along the black ocean like glowing bags, expanding, contracting, expanding contracting,” she opens and closes her arthritic hand with effort when she says this.

“Like a firework!” The girl responds, squeezing Bebe the shark.

“Yes. And like a firework, some jellyfish light up and swim along like little explosions in seas that have bioluminescent plankton. Do you know what bioluminescence is?” The grandmother asks the girl. She shakes her head.

“It’s when tiny creatures in the ocean make their own light, like submerged stars,” the grandmother says, “Not everything that lives in the dark is bad.”

“I like how that sounds. This is a good story,” the girl says, sleepily, hypnotized by the grandmother’s voice, deaf to the gunfire and glass-crunching outside. The girl’s eyes begin to close.

“Jellyfish have no brain, or spine. They’re all nerves and water. Their tentacles are long, so long that they don’t even know when they snare something and hurt it,” the grandmother says, looking out at their shadows swimming in the dwindling warmth of the candlelight.

“It’s like that with people too sometimes. They drift on a current, all nerves and pain, snaring and stinging whatever gets caught in their undertow, poisoning others slow,” she says, to oak-paneled walls, to the shadows, to her hands, to all the parts that remember this feeling. 

The mother reaches out to the grandmother and squeezes her arm.

They both look down at the girl, who snores lightly, buoyed by the thin, dark arms of the mother and the grandmother –no, her mother, her grandmother. There is an affirmation in closing the trench and claiming them, even if the next sunrise isn’t guaranteed– that cover her like a Teflon shell. 

The world outside shakes and continues to crumble in the long night of the final offensive. 

But in the bedroom, the girl burrows deeper into dreams, where gunfights burst like a cerulean bioluminescent bloom and explosions in the night sky pass by like silent sea nettles diving deeper and deeper into the blackened sea.

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Alex McAnarney-Castro (A.M. Castro) is a Salvadoran American writer and human rights activist raised in Mexico City and San Salvador. For 15 years, she’s worked across Latin America and the U.S., and published non-fiction and fiction in LatineLit, Latin@ Literatures, Last Girls Club, Dark Harbor Magazine, A Sufferer’s Digest, Oddessa Collective, Defunkt Magazine, and Trinty College’s New Square Literary Magazine. She studied journalism, literature, and creative writing at Florida International University and received a Master’s in Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago, with a focus on Medical Anthropology. In line with her studies, professional trajectory, and interests, much of her work explores how war, mass violence, memory, trauma, illness, and geography often shape and twist communities, families, and individuals. Currently, she live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with her husband and dog Lola.

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