Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

2019 Calibre Essay Prize (runner-up): 'Floundering' by Sarah Walker

by
June–July 2019, no. 412

2019 Calibre Essay Prize (runner-up): 'Floundering' by Sarah Walker

by
June–July 2019, no. 412

I swim at night, carving through water full of chlorine and tasting of mould, turning lap after lap before the pool closes down, while cells inside me hurry into being like bubbles under a running tap. The lifeguard stalks along beside the pool watching me. I know he’s trying to get me out, but I can’t stop swimming. I have to reach sixty laps, because ending on a non-round number is too terrifying tonight, because everything is too terrifying, because I am pregnant. I tumble-turn at both walls. If I don’t surface, I reason, he can’t stop me. I can keep swimming forever, until my heart lies back down and everything goes back to normal, before today, before it all changed. It is a pool noodle that is finally my undoing. The lifeguard prods me with one like a boy testing roadkill for life, and I can’t pretend to ignore him anymore. I surface, blinking up at him, staring at the blue and white flags stretched across the pool and trying not to cry.

Two weeks in, says the internet, the sex of the baby has already been decided.

I wake up gasping, a low, sick moan floating into the morning. I shake the body beside me, frowning. He kisses me softly, says, ‘It’s only the chickens’, but to me it still sounds like screaming. In the bathroom mirror I watch how my aching right breast has already changed shape, kicking out, reaching for the mouth my body hasn’t yet grown.

It was a girl, I thought.

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.