Competition Eighteen Shortlisted: Abandonment Study by Cheryl Tan

On the week I was born, my father disguised me as a beer belly and took to the stairs of the highest water slide in Wild Wild Wet. His summer body breathing a new tan, toes swollen as grapes beneath the water. He queued up in his decathlon swimming trunks while I pummelled at the waistband of his flesh, chlorine seeping through the womb sewed like an organ. This was before he was diagnosed with low blood pressure. Looking down he saw the swimmers, the pseudo-beach goers wading in dots around the park, the slide an interloper to my birth. He felt the drop and the tunnel sucking around him, but because he was a boy he said nothing.

The vortex floated him out into the sun like driftwood. Unconscious, distinctly undreaming, resurrecting light, the linea nigra striped against his skin. My head a block of seaweed in his abdomen. As I pissed out salt within my sac the current pulled him away from the dark with a tenderness unknown to him. For that moment we were there and unattended, his feet a sea of nothing, his palms faced up in tidepools after dawn. 

Cheryl Tan (she/her) is a Singaporean of Chinese and Indian descent. She has been published in Amber: The Teenage Chapbook, Ice Lolly Review, Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, Parallax Literary Magazine and Streetcake Magazine. She can be found speaking at open mic nights, fiddling with prose and drinking bubble tea. Find her on Twitter – @implausiette

Photo by Lily Banse on Unsplash

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