The Banana River Canal
Ashton Carlile 


 

When I was fourteen my brother speared a stingray. Right in the middle of its slimy, grey body.

​He twisted the spear around until it started thrashing, because it wasn’t thrashing initially. It flapped its pectoral fins as if to say: sorry, I forgot to give you a show. It was sunset and our dinghy boat was green.

“For Steve Irwin,” he said, one dirty foot resting on the front of the boat, his long toes curled over the front.

“Okay,” I said quietly, looking at the dead alien. In that moment I wanted to be a really old person who said no in a convincing way. I wanted to be as resilient as the suffocating green that coated the water and trees and our lives back then.

In school a few years before this, we learned the stingray shuffle. Pretty much what the name implies. You shuffle your feet when you’re in the water as if to say: I’m here, alien. Don’t sting me. But I did it as a warning. They could sting me if they really wanted to. Took the dinghy out to the place where it happened and shuffled until shards of shells made the bottoms of my feet bleed. My brother will come back, I said. He will come back and kill you all. Or someone else who looks like him will. I’m so sorry. The mangroves filtered the water.

***

One winter in college I brought Owen, neither a friend nor a romantic partner, something else entirely but we were both too tired to figure it out, to my old purple house on the canal and showed him the large decorative sun on top of the garage overlooking the driveway. It had a smiling human face. We stared at it for a long time. I explained to him that we had rented the house when we lived in it so my parents were too afraid to do anything to the smiling sun.

Owen’s parents owned his childhood home and was from New Jersey or New Hampshire. When he said that a carpet was like the sky or something lifelessly poetic like that you really wanted to believe him. We walked to the dock and watched the moldy pontoons follow each other in a line. It was Christmas, and we were sweating, and there was the boat parade, right in front of our eyes.

“Seems like all of the boats know you,” Owen said.

I waved back, opening and then unopening my hand.

“They do,” I said. They were all my neighbors before I moved away. Kathy and her husband Tom, who owned the now foreclosed auto shop that also functioned as a home for stray cats. Mr. Hickerson, who left his wife for a Russian woman, and made his two children sit at the front of the boat, uncomfortably dangling their skinny legs and arms. The Russian woman had sunglasses on that hid her face. And then you couldn’t forget about the Jones family--their boat was the best, but other than that, I guess you could forget about the Jones family. They drove their boats and played Jingle Bells and scarred the manatees’ backs. The manatees bobbed up and down like life rafts.

There was a place right between Owen’s beard and his ear that I liked to kiss. Soft like a stingray. I put my lips there and his face didn’t do much. This, I thought, might be romance. Then I thought hey wait a second. Then I waited.

“I want to go back home. I miss the plant on my bedside table with glass pebbles for soil.” he said.

“I understand,” I said, and a fish jumped frantically out of the water.

“Thanks for understanding.”

I thought about how in German “You’re welcome” also means “Please”. For weeks, I thought about that and nothing else.

***

My brother got bored of stingrays, and city officials did too I guess because they are using the water to make more money. The water turns red sometimes and people take pictures of it and friends and family and strangers react to the pictures. No one really swims in the brackish water anymore except me. I’m shuffling near the mangroves saying you can come back now. I’m here, alien. The mangroves don’t smell great.

If you have the urge, you can adopt a stingray for $35 from the World Animal Foundation. I did, and I got a glossy photo of her in the mail. The photo says her name is Karen, and that she has a great personality, but I changed her name to Rip Torn, the name of an actor. He is from Temple, Texas. The stingray is from somewhere on the Gulf Coast.

“What kind of name is that?” My brother asked, when we were in the living room watching the credits of one of his movies. “Rip Torn?”

“Rip Torn,” I repeated, looking at his dirty feet resting on the recliner. I felt sea sick.
 
 









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About the Author: 
Ashton Carlile is a writer living in NYC. You can find previous work in SmokeLong Quarterly, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She hasn't done much yet but hopes to do something soon.

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