“Hazardous to Sea Life,” by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple (Fiction ’19)
2019 fiction alum Alyson Mosquera Dutemple was recently featured in Matchbook. Read an excerpt of “Hazardous to Sea Life” below:
Hazardous to Sea Life
Molly said when she stroked books, they purred for her. It sounded sort of dirty to me, and I got a little flushed, to be honest, hearing her talk like that, watching her demonstrate in the library during study hall, holding a book open wide in her lap and running her fingers over the binding, pretending to search for the exact spot that would make the book warm to her, reveal its secret self. Its low voice, like a lover’s.
She was explaining about the purring thing to April. It must have been some sort of inside joke because, though it wasn’t all that funny, April laughed. Then Molly laughed. And with her head thrown back like that, Molly’s mouth was open so wide that you could see all the way back to her fillings.
It was dark back there, in Molly’s mouth, but her fillings were gleaming and wet. I wished I could get a closer look at them. It made me feel a little less lonely to see all that silver marring her teeth. Less guilty, somehow, about sitting alone at the study hall table, eavesdropping, when everyone else around me was paired off, whispering their own private jokes. I turned the pages of the dictionary I was pretending to read. I ran my finger over the columns of “s” words and stopped at “saliva.”
Molly and April laughed again, louder this time, but I didn’t look up because I didn’t want them to know I was listening, because I knew then they would start to whisper, and I would no longer be able to hear what they said. I wanted to be in on their private joke, and some part of me wanted to tell them something private about myself, too. Maybe about the box at home where I kept the rings. The plastic ones that tether six-packs together, the ones that all the nature shows say are hazardous to sea life. At first, I started saving them to cut them up into pieces, but after a while, I started keeping them intact, and now I had this whole collection hidden away in a box.
Sometimes, when I took them all out and fanned them on the floor, I liked to pretend that I was an animal stuck inside of one. I would writhe around on the carpet until I could practically feel the unforgiving twist of the plastic around my throat, the pressure of it on my neck. Imagining being stuck inside one of those loops made my eyes bulge, and sometimes I’d open my mouth and start to gulp as if I were struggling for air. I’d hold my breath. I wouldn’t let myself blink or swallow. I’d keep going until I felt all dried out.
Read the story in its entirety here: https://www.matchbooklitmag.com/dutemple
