Swan Dive by Mel Hicks
r.kv.r.y. quarterly spring 2008 fiction
r.kv.r.y. quarterly spring 2008 fiction
There were others. The man with the arthritic knee who returned for his second visit boasting a tan he said
he’d gotten after three blissful hours on the golf course. The woman with the migraines who cast her eyes
straight up at the afternoon sun until Lea was sure her retinas would smolder. Clients walked out minus their
burdens, and Lea had the sense that they’d left something behind, more than a few bills for a tip. A box,
sealed at the edges, the wrapping tacked down with neat squares of tape, a present in disguise. Pain re-gifted.
Lea took the brunt of the illness with her own body. Her new trick knee, the unexplained blisters, the tunnel
vision, the nosebleeds. No pain, never any pain connected to it. Nothing for her mind to grasp hold of, make
real. And now this man with his withered spirit and desperate determination begging Lea to draw the poison
from his system. She said yes, surprised. She was certain she had formed no on her tongue.
The pain was too personal, as though Lea was reaching into his soul, extracting his sins, reading the diary
of his indiscretions page by page. She wanted to pull away, but her hands held firm to his damp, cool skin. A
puddle beaded in the cavern of his back. The knots of his spine pushed against his flesh like stones peaking in
shallow water.
Lea felt a sudden mass of energy, a glowing ball beneath her palms. The colors of heat: crimson and
orange and burnished gold, mixed with the colors of bruises: purple and black and swirls of blue. She pitched
forward as her hands sealed to his flesh, the pain drawing up into her, through her, passing between skin and
blood and bone, curling up in a corner of her cells. The man’s body relinquished the beast in two violent
spasms as Lea’s arms flung upward, the force knocking her back into the wall.
“Holy Christ!” He bolted from the table, held her rooted to the floor with a grip on her shoulders that grew
stronger by the second. “What just happened?”
Lea saw the realization take hold. He was a foot taller from the man who trudged through the door. His
body composed itself to the change in posture. “Damn, damn...” he said in a way that told Lea his mind had to
make the adjustment, too. “I don’t know...how did you...Holy Christ!” He rolled his shoulders, twisted his torso
back and forth, slid out from under the burden of pain, a thin sheet now bunched at the fringes of his
consciousness.
Lea retreated to her table, straightened her inks, pretended not to be affected by the transformation
before her. Just another customer. But she had saved this man from deep, apocalyptic suffering. She let his
voice knock around inside of her, this new voice that skipped with amusement. She ran his name across her
mind.
Bryce fixed his gaze on Lea, stared through her. “How do you do it?”
Lea shook her head.
“I need to understand.”
“I don’t know. It just happens.” Her voice slipped out a whisper.
Bryce let his eyes wander, down, then up. Not in a way that made Lea feel self-conscious. But as though
with one sweep, he had broken her down and built her back up.
Something caught in her throat, and she coughed, a rasping, terse sound.
Bryce lurched toward her. “It’s not in you now, is it? What you did, it didn’t—”
“No.” Lea shrunk back, cradled her arms.
As though realizing he had violated some rule of conduct, Bryce adjusted the space between them.
“Okay. Okay.” Then, “It’s cancer. Started in the bone, spread from there. For two months now, it’s been
like someone taking a jackhammer to my back. I don’t sleep anymore, some days I can barely move. And when
I came here...I thought, I don’t know what I thought. I was desperate. You were my last hope.”
Lea’s throat coiled tight. She tugged at her sleeves, adjusted them to cover her wrists. Would a man think
it odd, a sweater in July? Lea’s bad knee tripped her balance. She compensated with a quick reach to the back
of her chair, mumbled her goodbye, ignored Bryce’s hesitation, the anticipation that seeped from his steady
gaze. When he left, she snuck a glance out the window, saw him navigate the front steps in one bounding leap.
Wondered why she wanted to keep this man’s pain inside of her.
Later, Lea slipped into the bathroom, all tremors and nauseous stomach. Adrenaline drained from Lea’s
body. The pain pinched her like a knot being squeezed into itself. A rod shot up her spine, her range of motion
limited not by pain but by the recollection of it, her body reacting to the ailment without knowing why. Bryce’s
pain was swelling within her, bolstered by its new freedom. Fresh razor in hand, Lea built an addition to the
scar tissue on her arms and legs, released the pain she couldn’t feel, watched it trickle out with her blood, drop
by drop by drop.
Weeks passed. Lea awoke every day to the sight of Bryce outlined on the shades of her eyes. Her memory
traced the bend of his brows, the cavities below his cheekbones, the uneven slant of his lips. When the tinny
bell above the door nudged her out of her daydream, Lea knew before he even spoke a word. A man cut in
half. Bryce cursed under his breath as he rolled into the chair, knees knocking into his stomach, body pretzeled
in agony. He started, “I wouldn’t ask...” until pain cleaved his breath.
How this hopeful, desperate man placed his faith in her, believing that she could take from him what drugs
and herbs and prayers could not! Lea glided her hands down Bryce’s back. She felt the twitch in her palms,
tasted the pitted metal of the toxins meant to cure him. She sensed a pulsing, fiery web of ache and torment,
absent the first time they met; now it caused his body to flinch and stiffen, his mind to negotiate with it, his
spirit, hardened and resigned, to beckon it inward until it became a part of the rhythm of his life. Even as he
fought its iron grip, Lea sensed that a part of Bryce was reluctant to let the pain go, as though having lived
with it as his constant companion, he could no longer envision life without it.
Afterward, Lea, winded and spent, coiled into a ball on her bed. Her body protested the slightest
movement, paralyzed while this new visitor moved about in her cells. No pain, never any pain. Though she
couldn’t feel it, it existed just the same.
Bryce perched next to her. Whole again. “It’s too much for you.” He cupped his fingers over her hand. Spit
the words out. “I won’t come back.”
Lea shook her head. “Come back.”
She awoke to a tray left on her nightstand: a turkey sandwich, an apple sliced into careful wedges, a burst
of wildflowers stuffed into a coffee mug. He had scribbled on a post-it note: “Angel,” and underlined in that
word the letters of her name.
That night, Lea stood at the bathroom mirror, razor in hand. Puckered scars up both arms. Bryce’s pain
throbbing through her veins. She dropped the razor back into the drawer, kept his ghost locked inside.
The next time she saw Bryce, his face was contorted, mouth twisted to one side, forehead buckled. A week
had passed. Lea spotted him standing outside the door. Maybe he didn’t have the strength to open it, then
Lea realized it took all his strength not to.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked, leading him in with a two-finger hook on his elbow. She tried to
straighten her spine, force her body to forgo the posture it had adopted since Bryce’s last visit.
“I tried to stay away...”
Lea removed his shirt. His bones pointed toward her, skin loose as a sheet on a line, bruises coloring the
crooks of both elbows, waxy braids of scars woven across his abdomen. Significant, purposeful scars inflicted
by skilled hands, the marks of numerous attempts to carve out the disease. Scars that told a story of fate.
The pressure of Bryce’s pain threatened to rip Lea apart at the seams. Her stomach roiled, eyes clouded
over. Bryce was filled with the stuff, gushing pain faster than Lea could absorb it. But she held her hands
steady, rose and fell with the torrent, like the albatross that skims the surface of the water without ever
touching it.
Afterward, she rested. Bryce stood over her, watchful, remorseful. She told him she was tired, that was all.
She shifted her body closer to the wall, opened a space for him behind her. Closed her eyes and felt the spread
of him as he lay down. His breath had grown steady, and when he dangled a bony arm across her belly, it was
no longer trembling. Where his skin touched hers, she could feel new pain taking root. So while Bryce slept,
Lea raked her hands slowly across his body. Pain gathered in a tight fist, pounded against the craggy flesh of
her palms until she invited it in, and once inside, it settled in a hollow cavern of loss that had cracked open long
ago.
“I’m gonna die soon,” he said the next morning, as if he was simply telling her his plans for the day. The
words stuck in Lea’s throat like splinters. “Before I do, I want something from you.” He took her hand, turned
it over, stroked the length of her fingers. “I want to take you with me. Whatever you want to draw.”
She tried to protest, but he shushed her with his lips, and even in that lingering moment, she could not
deny what she sensed: the disease was on the march, claiming more of his cells with each advance. And
though the pain it caused now raced through her veins, the damage to Bryce could not be outrun. He would
die. He would leave her.
Bryce didn’t sit back like the rest. Followed her every stroke. Sometimes, he bent so close Lea could feel
his tempered breath part her hair. It was hard not to lose concentration, to keep the image of her design fixed
in her mind, all the while blocking the pulsing sensation of pain radiating into her.
No, she didn’t need a break, Lea told him on hour four. She was almost finished, stroking in a final blush of
sun on the flared wings. She stepped to the side, revealing Bryce’s reflection in the full-length mirror behind
her. He stood immediately. Gazed down at himself, then his reflection, folded his arms, knew intuitively the
perfect position to hold so that the swans, one on each arm, bent their heads in quiet submission to each
other.
At first, Lea thought it was the fluorescents playing tricks on the whites of Bryce’s eyes. Then she thought
it was the sunlight. And finally, she questioned her own sight, imagining a yellow tinge to everything she saw.
“It’s reached my liver,” he said. “I have a few days, at most.” Resignation, acceptance. Bryce was lying on
Lea’s bed, a mere sketch of the man who had first appeared in her doorway. His hands shook now, constantly.
He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, got up only to stand before the mirror and arrange the swans in their embrace.
Lea had been stumbling through a quiet prayer, trying to put the words in the right order, as if there was
some trick to it. She came to him, stretched her hands across his abdomen, rested her head atop his cold,
clammy skin, felt the pain peaking before it broke the boundaries of his body and entered hers.
Bryce peeled Lea’s hands from his body. “Don’t,” he said. “No more.”
“I can take it. Let me.” Her body shuddered in fits, fighting the effect of the pain, a stranger she knew
intimately now.
Bryce’s body sagged against a tower of pillows. “I know I’m dying...in here.” He tapped his temple. “But
without the pain, I don’t know I’m dying....” His fist butted up against his chest, over his heart. “In here. The
pain makes it real, so you know it in both places.”
“No-no! I can—”
His wavering finger to her lips. Voice slipping out between shallow breaths. “You can’t save me.”
Lea stood. The walls inched closer. The pain inside her thrashed back and forth, restless, anxious, violent.
She slammed a fist against the wall. A picture thudded to the ground, sent up a hail of glass. Bryce snatched
Lea off her feet with surprising strength, dragging her onto the bed with him. She twisted from his grip. Bare
feet landing on wood. She walked circles over the broken glass, grief whipping her into a frenzy. Tears mixed
with blood. Bryce stumbled across the shards of glass, held her tight. And finally she was still.
* * *
Lea doesn’t look down for fear she’ll throw off her balance, doesn’t want to leap before she’s ready. She
won’t be the first to jump from this bridge. Won’t be the last. From where she stands--the center of the
bridge, a point that juts into the sky in a fierce challenge to gravity--she knows her body will hit the water in
3.5 seconds at 75 miles per hour.
The fall will break her bones and rupture her organs; intellectually, she has accepted this consequence.
Physically, Lea will feel nothing. Even if she lives for minutes before she dies--as some jumpers do--she’ll be
oblivious to her injuries, slipping into unconsciousness until death stakes its claim.
Car horns blare as drivers spot Lea. She takes the cue, steadies herself. Choppy water stretches toward
the sun as it surrenders in a final gasp of blazing orange hues. High above, a lone seagull toys with the wind,
riding a current that lifts it toward the heavens.
he’d gotten after three blissful hours on the golf course. The woman with the migraines who cast her eyes
straight up at the afternoon sun until Lea was sure her retinas would smolder. Clients walked out minus their
burdens, and Lea had the sense that they’d left something behind, more than a few bills for a tip. A box,
sealed at the edges, the wrapping tacked down with neat squares of tape, a present in disguise. Pain re-gifted.
Lea took the brunt of the illness with her own body. Her new trick knee, the unexplained blisters, the tunnel
vision, the nosebleeds. No pain, never any pain connected to it. Nothing for her mind to grasp hold of, make
real. And now this man with his withered spirit and desperate determination begging Lea to draw the poison
from his system. She said yes, surprised. She was certain she had formed no on her tongue.
The pain was too personal, as though Lea was reaching into his soul, extracting his sins, reading the diary
of his indiscretions page by page. She wanted to pull away, but her hands held firm to his damp, cool skin. A
puddle beaded in the cavern of his back. The knots of his spine pushed against his flesh like stones peaking in
shallow water.
Lea felt a sudden mass of energy, a glowing ball beneath her palms. The colors of heat: crimson and
orange and burnished gold, mixed with the colors of bruises: purple and black and swirls of blue. She pitched
forward as her hands sealed to his flesh, the pain drawing up into her, through her, passing between skin and
blood and bone, curling up in a corner of her cells. The man’s body relinquished the beast in two violent
spasms as Lea’s arms flung upward, the force knocking her back into the wall.
“Holy Christ!” He bolted from the table, held her rooted to the floor with a grip on her shoulders that grew
stronger by the second. “What just happened?”
Lea saw the realization take hold. He was a foot taller from the man who trudged through the door. His
body composed itself to the change in posture. “Damn, damn...” he said in a way that told Lea his mind had to
make the adjustment, too. “I don’t know...how did you...Holy Christ!” He rolled his shoulders, twisted his torso
back and forth, slid out from under the burden of pain, a thin sheet now bunched at the fringes of his
consciousness.
Lea retreated to her table, straightened her inks, pretended not to be affected by the transformation
before her. Just another customer. But she had saved this man from deep, apocalyptic suffering. She let his
voice knock around inside of her, this new voice that skipped with amusement. She ran his name across her
mind.
Bryce fixed his gaze on Lea, stared through her. “How do you do it?”
Lea shook her head.
“I need to understand.”
“I don’t know. It just happens.” Her voice slipped out a whisper.
Bryce let his eyes wander, down, then up. Not in a way that made Lea feel self-conscious. But as though
with one sweep, he had broken her down and built her back up.
Something caught in her throat, and she coughed, a rasping, terse sound.
Bryce lurched toward her. “It’s not in you now, is it? What you did, it didn’t—”
“No.” Lea shrunk back, cradled her arms.
As though realizing he had violated some rule of conduct, Bryce adjusted the space between them.
“Okay. Okay.” Then, “It’s cancer. Started in the bone, spread from there. For two months now, it’s been
like someone taking a jackhammer to my back. I don’t sleep anymore, some days I can barely move. And when
I came here...I thought, I don’t know what I thought. I was desperate. You were my last hope.”
Lea’s throat coiled tight. She tugged at her sleeves, adjusted them to cover her wrists. Would a man think
it odd, a sweater in July? Lea’s bad knee tripped her balance. She compensated with a quick reach to the back
of her chair, mumbled her goodbye, ignored Bryce’s hesitation, the anticipation that seeped from his steady
gaze. When he left, she snuck a glance out the window, saw him navigate the front steps in one bounding leap.
Wondered why she wanted to keep this man’s pain inside of her.
Later, Lea slipped into the bathroom, all tremors and nauseous stomach. Adrenaline drained from Lea’s
body. The pain pinched her like a knot being squeezed into itself. A rod shot up her spine, her range of motion
limited not by pain but by the recollection of it, her body reacting to the ailment without knowing why. Bryce’s
pain was swelling within her, bolstered by its new freedom. Fresh razor in hand, Lea built an addition to the
scar tissue on her arms and legs, released the pain she couldn’t feel, watched it trickle out with her blood, drop
by drop by drop.
Weeks passed. Lea awoke every day to the sight of Bryce outlined on the shades of her eyes. Her memory
traced the bend of his brows, the cavities below his cheekbones, the uneven slant of his lips. When the tinny
bell above the door nudged her out of her daydream, Lea knew before he even spoke a word. A man cut in
half. Bryce cursed under his breath as he rolled into the chair, knees knocking into his stomach, body pretzeled
in agony. He started, “I wouldn’t ask...” until pain cleaved his breath.
How this hopeful, desperate man placed his faith in her, believing that she could take from him what drugs
and herbs and prayers could not! Lea glided her hands down Bryce’s back. She felt the twitch in her palms,
tasted the pitted metal of the toxins meant to cure him. She sensed a pulsing, fiery web of ache and torment,
absent the first time they met; now it caused his body to flinch and stiffen, his mind to negotiate with it, his
spirit, hardened and resigned, to beckon it inward until it became a part of the rhythm of his life. Even as he
fought its iron grip, Lea sensed that a part of Bryce was reluctant to let the pain go, as though having lived
with it as his constant companion, he could no longer envision life without it.
Afterward, Lea, winded and spent, coiled into a ball on her bed. Her body protested the slightest
movement, paralyzed while this new visitor moved about in her cells. No pain, never any pain. Though she
couldn’t feel it, it existed just the same.
Bryce perched next to her. Whole again. “It’s too much for you.” He cupped his fingers over her hand. Spit
the words out. “I won’t come back.”
Lea shook her head. “Come back.”
She awoke to a tray left on her nightstand: a turkey sandwich, an apple sliced into careful wedges, a burst
of wildflowers stuffed into a coffee mug. He had scribbled on a post-it note: “Angel,” and underlined in that
word the letters of her name.
That night, Lea stood at the bathroom mirror, razor in hand. Puckered scars up both arms. Bryce’s pain
throbbing through her veins. She dropped the razor back into the drawer, kept his ghost locked inside.
The next time she saw Bryce, his face was contorted, mouth twisted to one side, forehead buckled. A week
had passed. Lea spotted him standing outside the door. Maybe he didn’t have the strength to open it, then
Lea realized it took all his strength not to.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked, leading him in with a two-finger hook on his elbow. She tried to
straighten her spine, force her body to forgo the posture it had adopted since Bryce’s last visit.
“I tried to stay away...”
Lea removed his shirt. His bones pointed toward her, skin loose as a sheet on a line, bruises coloring the
crooks of both elbows, waxy braids of scars woven across his abdomen. Significant, purposeful scars inflicted
by skilled hands, the marks of numerous attempts to carve out the disease. Scars that told a story of fate.
The pressure of Bryce’s pain threatened to rip Lea apart at the seams. Her stomach roiled, eyes clouded
over. Bryce was filled with the stuff, gushing pain faster than Lea could absorb it. But she held her hands
steady, rose and fell with the torrent, like the albatross that skims the surface of the water without ever
touching it.
Afterward, she rested. Bryce stood over her, watchful, remorseful. She told him she was tired, that was all.
She shifted her body closer to the wall, opened a space for him behind her. Closed her eyes and felt the spread
of him as he lay down. His breath had grown steady, and when he dangled a bony arm across her belly, it was
no longer trembling. Where his skin touched hers, she could feel new pain taking root. So while Bryce slept,
Lea raked her hands slowly across his body. Pain gathered in a tight fist, pounded against the craggy flesh of
her palms until she invited it in, and once inside, it settled in a hollow cavern of loss that had cracked open long
ago.
“I’m gonna die soon,” he said the next morning, as if he was simply telling her his plans for the day. The
words stuck in Lea’s throat like splinters. “Before I do, I want something from you.” He took her hand, turned
it over, stroked the length of her fingers. “I want to take you with me. Whatever you want to draw.”
She tried to protest, but he shushed her with his lips, and even in that lingering moment, she could not
deny what she sensed: the disease was on the march, claiming more of his cells with each advance. And
though the pain it caused now raced through her veins, the damage to Bryce could not be outrun. He would
die. He would leave her.
Bryce didn’t sit back like the rest. Followed her every stroke. Sometimes, he bent so close Lea could feel
his tempered breath part her hair. It was hard not to lose concentration, to keep the image of her design fixed
in her mind, all the while blocking the pulsing sensation of pain radiating into her.
No, she didn’t need a break, Lea told him on hour four. She was almost finished, stroking in a final blush of
sun on the flared wings. She stepped to the side, revealing Bryce’s reflection in the full-length mirror behind
her. He stood immediately. Gazed down at himself, then his reflection, folded his arms, knew intuitively the
perfect position to hold so that the swans, one on each arm, bent their heads in quiet submission to each
other.
At first, Lea thought it was the fluorescents playing tricks on the whites of Bryce’s eyes. Then she thought
it was the sunlight. And finally, she questioned her own sight, imagining a yellow tinge to everything she saw.
“It’s reached my liver,” he said. “I have a few days, at most.” Resignation, acceptance. Bryce was lying on
Lea’s bed, a mere sketch of the man who had first appeared in her doorway. His hands shook now, constantly.
He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, got up only to stand before the mirror and arrange the swans in their embrace.
Lea had been stumbling through a quiet prayer, trying to put the words in the right order, as if there was
some trick to it. She came to him, stretched her hands across his abdomen, rested her head atop his cold,
clammy skin, felt the pain peaking before it broke the boundaries of his body and entered hers.
Bryce peeled Lea’s hands from his body. “Don’t,” he said. “No more.”
“I can take it. Let me.” Her body shuddered in fits, fighting the effect of the pain, a stranger she knew
intimately now.
Bryce’s body sagged against a tower of pillows. “I know I’m dying...in here.” He tapped his temple. “But
without the pain, I don’t know I’m dying....” His fist butted up against his chest, over his heart. “In here. The
pain makes it real, so you know it in both places.”
“No-no! I can—”
His wavering finger to her lips. Voice slipping out between shallow breaths. “You can’t save me.”
Lea stood. The walls inched closer. The pain inside her thrashed back and forth, restless, anxious, violent.
She slammed a fist against the wall. A picture thudded to the ground, sent up a hail of glass. Bryce snatched
Lea off her feet with surprising strength, dragging her onto the bed with him. She twisted from his grip. Bare
feet landing on wood. She walked circles over the broken glass, grief whipping her into a frenzy. Tears mixed
with blood. Bryce stumbled across the shards of glass, held her tight. And finally she was still.
* * *
Lea doesn’t look down for fear she’ll throw off her balance, doesn’t want to leap before she’s ready. She
won’t be the first to jump from this bridge. Won’t be the last. From where she stands--the center of the
bridge, a point that juts into the sky in a fierce challenge to gravity--she knows her body will hit the water in
3.5 seconds at 75 miles per hour.
The fall will break her bones and rupture her organs; intellectually, she has accepted this consequence.
Physically, Lea will feel nothing. Even if she lives for minutes before she dies--as some jumpers do--she’ll be
oblivious to her injuries, slipping into unconsciousness until death stakes its claim.
Car horns blare as drivers spot Lea. She takes the cue, steadies herself. Choppy water stretches toward
the sun as it surrenders in a final gasp of blazing orange hues. High above, a lone seagull toys with the wind,
riding a current that lifts it toward the heavens.
