Maribel and the Patient Sea

About this story

In the blood warm shallows of the evening lagoon, a girl named Maribel practices floating on her back while her grandmother's hands wait beneath her shoulders. Breath by breath she lets the water take her weight, until the hands are gone and the lagoon holds her alone. That night her bed holds her the same way, and she borrows the shell to hear the water say it again.

Trusting something larger than yourself to hold you up.

The water holds you the moment you stop holding yourself.

Read the beginning

The lagoon was warm as bathwater and pink as the inside of a shell, and Maribel stood in it up to her waist with her toes dug hard into the sand, trying with all her might to float, and failing. Right beside her bobbed a round brown pelican, riding the little evening swells easy as a cork, up and down, up and down, not trying at all. Maribel was seven, and she could swim in her splashing way, and she could dive for a shell off the bottom, but she could not float, because to float you must lift your feet off the floor of the whole world, and that was the one thing she could not make herself do. "Show me how, pelican," she whispered. "How do you rest on the water like that?"

High over the lagoon, against the last rose of the sky, a glossy black raven came sailing on wide still wings. It crossed the warm pink water slow and easy, and looked down once at the little brown pelican bobbing on the swells, and at the girl standing so stiff beside it, and it turned one long quiet circle over them both, the way it does just before a story begins.

The pelican gave a small paddle of its black feet and slid out toward the middle of the lagoon, where the water turned to gold, and there it settled and bobbed and looked back at her, as if to say, come. Maribel took one step after it, and then another, until the warm water climbed to her chest, and up to her chin. But she knew that just ahead the sandy floor fell clean away into the deep gold water, where there was nothing at all to stand on, and a girl who could not float could not follow there. So she stopped, with her chin in the water and her toes clamped to the sand, wanting so much to go, and not able.

But the pelican bobbed so gently, and the gold water looked so kind, that Maribel took one small step more, wanting only to be near her friend. And the sandy floor was not there. Her foot came down on nothing at all. The warm sea closed soft and quick over her head, and there was gold light shining above her and green deep below her, and no bottom anywhere for her feet to find.

Maribel kicked and grabbed and beat at the water with both arms, and the more she fought the sea the more the sea let her sink. She reached for the pelican, but it lifted on a swell and bobbed just out of her fingers, the way a floating thing always does when you snatch at it. Her hand found no feathers and her feet found no floor. Then, at last, her toe touched sand, and she scrambled and splashed her way back to where she could stand, and there she stood streaming and gasping, more afraid of the deep gold water than she had ever been in her whole life.

The story goes on in the video.