101
V o l . 11 N o . 2
Solar Flair
Tami Phelps
Eileen Duncan Walsh
Appearing Act Randall Dills
The Last Days The hottest summer on record. Before an A-frame beach cabin on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, she sits under the sun, cross-legged, drinking water from a canteen, droplets leaking down her smile lines. Sailboats idle in the strait, waiting for wind, reflected light from spars signaling secret messages to the uninitiated on shore. She watches butterflies, a shimmering fortunate few, the last of the luminous orange Checkerspots flitting above beach grass, coruscating like tiny distant explosions. She worries about the volcanoes—the ash might blot out the sun, the lava drown us in hellfire. She turns, runs into the cabin, screen door slamming, echoing, rousing the Great Dane, whose dolorous howl, like a fermata, drifts, and drifts, and drifts, over ocean spray— 57 days without rain.
A cuttlefish descends, cloak-like onto brown coral with crannies and stubs, or lengths of red kelp cut with shadow. Sand and shell fragments that shift in tide cause its skin to pearl and prick, to mirror. One fringe of fin girds the circumference, no spines or tines to reveal it. It undulates, hypnotic as a flame in the dark while tentacles poise to strike, or it can rest like a thin husk of kelp, and vanish. One porous bone under the sleek back buoys it. Bone that tapers like a feather, miniscule chambers that hold or release air against the briny press of the sea. Its topside grainy, as if wind trailed restlessly across sand. Each cuttlefish hides within lives set in rock, barb, or frond; fragments it passes by transform it. Yet it carries that one bone within that inhales and exhales, that perfects the eclipsed art of floating.