Krakow Melt by Daniel Allen Cox Read Free Book Online Page B

Lech Wałsa first stood on to stir brio in the workers, I’d never want to leave. The cradle of the Solidarity Movement was a warm place for babies of any age.
    The tram to the beach took forty-five minutes. The sun was already starting to wane, and we had run out of food, but the sight of white sand and blue water quelled our appetites and made us happy again. Dorota stripped two hundred metres from shore and bolted for the sea. Nobody wears clothes at the wet lip of the Baltic, especially not the sick. We all need some kind of healing.
    I stripped, too.
    The city does not feel like this. There is no salty mist coating your body like you’re a potato chip. Your scrotum does not shrivel, and your nipples don’t swell in the cool wind. You do not walk through clusters of people without seeing them, without assuming they are sand-dune formations.
    We swam together for a while, in opposite directions, until we couldn’t see each other anymore. I lost Dorota’s head in the sun’s reflection; I mistook her for a whitecap several times.
    I swam to where she was floating, and together we stared at the beach, just one of the horizons to look at.
    “Why do you suppose you’re so interested in fire?” she asked.
    “I like you a lot,” I said, “but I don’t like your question. It’s slanted. You’re asking me for a hypothesis, but you know full well I have a real answer.”
    “Please, let’s not fight out here.”
    “Then where?”
    We weren’t far from Westerplatte, where the Nazis had first invaded Poland to kick off the war, turning what was then called the Free City of Danzig and subsequently, the rest of Europe, into Silly Putty. I mentioned this fact to her.
    “You think too much,” she said, then dipped her head momentarily under the waterline. “And you don’t make it easy to be your friend.”
    “Sorry ... I’m being stupid,” I said. “Nobody has ever asked me before, that’s all. They just think I’m trying to get attention or that I’m a psycho, but they really have no idea.” The water was loosening me up, massaging me as it would wash undulations into a sand bar. “It started when I was a kid. There was a huge fire the colour of crayons. Yellow, red, orange. Red-orange. It turned a house into a volcano and it scared the shit out of me.”
    She was stretched out on the surface of the sea, as flat as a stingray. Her lips were blue. I felt numb.
    “Whose fire was it?”
    I bit my tongue. Fire belongs to everyone. That’s why I could hold Chicago to my chest; I would never have been able to burn something that wasn’t mine. Still, I knew what she meant. I would tell her someday, but I didn’t want to think about death and melting toys and death and frantic neighbours and death and screams and having to start a new school, not there where I was pleasantly discovering conch shells by shuffling my feet.
    “A little boy’s,” I said, and we left it at that.
    There must be a word for this: speaking of fire in the middle of the sea. What is it?
    “Time to go,” Dorota said. “We might burn out here, and besides, the online messageboard said that the action starts around dinner-time.”
    We bought some corn-on-the-cob from a friendly older couple, slathered it with smalec (you don’t want to know) and chomped down through the fat as Dorota led us west, to an isolated part of the beach.
    I had gotten dressed after drying off, though I was surprised that Dorota let me. She was walking with lead feet, kicking up buckets of sand. Amber hunting? Quite possibly. She had nice tits and a wonderful thatch of wayward pubic hair. Rebel child, from the toes up.
    We passed a szopka made of driftwood. It was a mini log cabin protecting carvings of Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus from the elements. The Three Magi were hanging out in the sand behind the cradle, working out my fate.
    Then I saw a penis. Then two. Big suckers, too. Men were playing hide-and-go-seek with each other, fucking and sucking on