By Marin Sardy
“And I’ll listen as she tells me about a woman who was born into the sea and raised by its creatures, a woman all blue, who in my mind will shimmer though my mother won’t say that she shimmers. Instead she’ll say the woman grew strong and built an army of crustaceans and mollusks.”
The Next Time I Watch The Walking Dead
I’ll wait until someone clever is on screen and I’ll press pause and ask them what people do about allergies in the zombie apocalypse. “I have terrible hay fever,” I’ll say as I climb into the television, wondering why I never thought to do that before. Then I’ll sneeze, twice, and say to no one, “I’ll have to raid a lot of Walgreens to stay supplied in Zyrtec.” If I find myself looking after the orphaned kids, I’ll tell them a story about a crow that ate an artichoke and was transformed into a woman. The kids will be enthralled, so I’ll keep going, saying, “but not a woman, quite—at least, not for sure.” Though she wouldn’t know what else she might be if not that. Something she couldn’t name, something for which no word exists.
The Next Time I Leave the House
The street will be empty, so I’ll walk down the middle, between the dashed white line and the solid yellow one, until I realize I’m not wearing my mask. Then I’ll stop and stare down at my feet in my flipflops, notice my toes, and bend to paint my nails—robin’s egg blue. I’ll get tired and kneel on the pavement, pulling out my phone to check my latest Instagram post and finding my mask in my pocket. Feeling dizzy, I’ll lie flat, face down, pebbles poking into my breasts as I try not to mess up my toenails, though that will be hard when the street turns inward, everything rolling toward the center, sliding sideways. And of course, it’s when all this is happening that I’ll get a text from my mother. So with my free hand I’ll call her, and lying there I’ll find myself repeating earnestly that she should not take the chicken out of the oven too soon.
The Next Time I Go Back Home
I’ll wind up in the kitchen at my dad’s house, wincing at the white of the countertops and hungry for something I haven’t craved since the year I saw the top of Everest. I’ll open the pantry and find the food exactly as I left it twenty years ago—the plastic jar of crunchy peanut butter, trail mix with raisins and M&Ms, boxes of Cheerios and Bran Flakes in a row above the carafe of salad dressing and the shelf full of spices. For the thousandth time I’ll be relieved that Dad isn’t home. Surveying the fridge, I’ll notice I forgot to take the can of orange juice concentrate out of the freezer. But there it will be—already thawed, next to the gallon of milk. And as I fall into a magnet-pinned photograph, I’ll understand that for so long these things have been happening without me.
The Next Time I Go Camping
I’ll squat close to the ground, taking a stick and poking around in the grass and dry leaves. I’ll squat like a very small child, able to stay that way for an hour without falling backward like a grown-up. And when I hear the scratching of chipmunks, I’ll follow them to the place on the mountain where the view is enormous—but I won’t look long because I’ve seen so many views.
Back by the tent I’ll find the kids playing cards, which will make me think of the last time I was surprised, pre-pandemic: one night years ago when the hillside was on fire and from our balcony you could see it—a ribbon of orange, wavering in the dark. Crawling, that’s what it was doing, across the night. And I’ll be stunned to know how rarely I am stunned. Then I’ll dig out the German potato salad, feeling pleasantly sure that the kids will love it, and I’ll cover the picnic table with a red checked cloth. And as we sit with our burgers I’ll watch their faces, so absorbed in the world, and I’ll want to say to them, “It’s been such a long time.” But I won’t say anything. Instead I’ll bend down and give a little piece of burger to the dog.
The Next Time I Visit My Mother
I’ll unlatch the screen door myself, from the outside, by this time accustomed to reaching through things. She’ll say, “Oh!”—a little alarmed—but then will let it go because I’m her daughter and she is forgiving.
I’ll sit in her living room, sideways in a paisley armchair, as she lies on her daybed in the way that she does. And I’ll listen as she tells me about a woman who was born into the sea and raised by its creatures, a woman all blue, who in my mind will shimmer though my mother won’t say that she shimmers. Instead she’ll say the woman grew strong and built an army of crustaceans and mollusks. Then she’ll let out a little sound, like her stomach hurts, but I’ll be looking past her through the sliding glass doors, out to the pond and the kingfisher sitting low on a branch. When she asks what’s the matter, I’ll say, “How do I get up onto the roof?” And it’s from the roof that I’ll see it coming—the wave. Really a body of water, a planet of water, the kind my mother mispronounces as “tusami.” I’ll spot a distant figure and for a moment I’ll think, That’s me, up there on a surfboard. But no, it’s someone else. And I’ll decide I should have gotten a mohawk long ago. Should have pasted it up with egg white, the old way, into a blade that could slice through the water like a fin.
The Time After the Next Time I Watch The Walking Dead
I’ll climb into the TV again, not just to anywhere but to a cabin where some of them hide out, and I’ll wait until the children have fallen asleep. Then I’ll go around back and find Daryl Dixon in his angel-wing vest and I’ll try to seduce him because he can’t be seduced. I’ll step close to him as he’s crouched there in the woods by his fire, and I’ll wait for a certain look to come into his eyes and then I’ll ask what he has to say about crustaceans and mollusks. And maybe I’ll like his answer or maybe I won’t, or maybe I’ll write his reply myself and have him read it from a cue card. Then with his crossbow he’ll reach suddenly past me, so that as I turn I’ll see his arrow pin a squirrel to the post holding up the clothesline. And just as I’m giving up on this seduction idea, the children will run out because they were not sleeping, because no one can sleep at the end of the world. They’ll all run to Daryl, swarming around him, saying they want to tell him a story about a crow that swallowed an artichoke.
For me, the most difficult part of the pandemic was the period in which it aligned with summer in Tucson, where I lived for eight years. That's the time of year when people are driven indoors for months, forcing an intense domesticity that I had always found difficult. When that was compounded by the closing of businesses and the need for social distancing, I started playing around with writing exercises that enabled me to access my feelings in different ways, searching for something that made sense in that strange context. I quickly landed on the use of future tense, as it spoke to the ways I had come to live in the future (and the television) as means of escape—all the things I imagined and envisioned I would do, if I could only leave the house. And since the future is always already a fiction, this speculative mode freed me from the need for fidelity to physical reality, which similarly felt appropriate. Given the surreal nature of the pandemic and of Tucson's summer heat, it was only natural for my speculations to turn surreal as well.
Marin Sardy is the author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia (Pantheon, 2019). Sardy’s book was excerpted in the New Yorker online and her essays have appeared in Tin House, Guernica, the Paris Review, the Missouri Review, and many other journals, as well as in two award-winning photography books. Sardy has been granted residency fellowships at Hawthornden Castle and Catwalk Institute and has three times had her essays listed as “notable” in the Best American series.