I resurface, crying. My mother, screaming. The water, red. Our first holiday together and my skull, totaled.
“I’ll be dead in a moment,” I hear myself saying in the arms of a stranger, oddly calm.
An elevator ride, an ambulance, a city rising in the distance beyond the windscreen. My mother in a bikini.
Six stitches later in a hospital in Antalya, and I’m reassembled. A bill offered to pay in jewellery, politely declined. A car ride back to the hotel, a blur.
My desire to jump into a pool again, gone. Well, backwards with my eyes closed, that is.
“I’ll be dead in a moment,” I hear myself saying in the arms of a stranger, oddly calm.
An elevator ride, an ambulance, a city rising in the distance beyond the windscreen. My mother in a bikini.
Six stitches later in a hospital in Antalya, and I’m reassembled. A bill offered to pay in jewellery, politely declined. A car ride back to the hotel, a blur.
My desire to jump into a pool again, gone. Well, backwards with my eyes closed, that is.
