EXIT — REBECCA HANNIGAN
/And then you have a breakdown at dinner. You finish your fish, the cod, but can’t finish dessert, panna cotta, as if you even know what panna cotta is. You’re drinking a martini and you like martinis, but it doesn’t go together, not the martini with the cod or the panna cotta with the cod or the panna cotta with the martini. Not any of it. Except you, you guess, you’re the common denominator. But you don’t feel like one. You just feel common. At the table, you’re beside your parents and brother and they look like all the other tan, white humans on this ship, being served and room-serviced by men and women who aren’t white, and you stand up and feel yourself sway and think: martini, but remember it’s the boat, a big, expensive boat with more layers than a wedding cake and even more vanilla. You didn’t want to get on this boat, and you hate yourself for not wanting to, hate yourself for having the privilege to resent something as expensive and nice as a cruise, that it’s an option for you, that it’s an obligation. You hate that you hate that it’s an obligation, that it exists as one, and here you are, obliging it.
Here you are, walking away from your family and panna cotta. You walk past the other diners, the other cruisers, whose faces are the same shade as the stewed tomatoes steaming on top of their grouper filets. You walk past them. For all the signs that say they are EXITs, you wish they were actually exits because you can’t get off this boat. You follow one sign, onto the deck. You take the stairs until you’re at the top, the 16th. You walk to the rail and think, you could jump. You think about how you’ve thought this every time you’ve been beside a railing, which is often, and how your fingers tingle and lose feeling when you hold on so hard to either keep you from pushing off or prepare you for pushing off, you can’t tell, but every time you look out and down you think about how it would feel, how far you would fall and then splash. In the dark, it would be harder for anyone to see your body in the water. You imagine you’d be invisible, like a superpower, like the superpower you’ve always wanted. A much better superpower than flying, which, really, if you jumped, you would do too. You think about inviting your family up to watch. They’d stare with their glazed eyes and an argument would start and escalate, and you’d let them argue you into stepping over the railing, to stepping off, like you’ve done a million times on smaller boats, on small docks, in lakes and ponds and rivers, just not the ocean, not from this height into this depth in such a sea as this. When have you been in such a sea as this.
Rebecca Hannigan is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Juked, Wigleaf, and is upcoming in Cosmonaut's Avenue.
