My Bathtub in the Shape of a Bull
Sam Martone
I tire of the island. I miss my hometown. I miss my mom. I miss land that’s not, on all sides, surrounded by water. Every day, I wake up hoping for some signal from the outside world, a message from a distant metropolis, but all I find are recipes, recipes for making a clock from a bushel of pears, recipes sent in ocean-tossed bottles from the lonely shores of yet another island.
My mom’s house, the house I grew up in, was across the street from an abandoned golf course, its greens overgrown, its sand traps expanding like a mold. When I was in middle school, an alligator made its home in one of the water hazards. It was an enormous thing, prehistoric in demeanor. The town had a field day anytime it was spotted, like a local celebrity. Newspaper reporters turned gator paparazzi. On days when I couldn’t bear to go to school, my mom drove us around the edge of the course making sightings of her own, pointing at clumps of branches or spiky underbrush and insisting it was the reptile.
Now, I live next door to an alligator. I visit his home when I see smoke rising from the chimney. I gift him a wooden end table, painted to match his décor, and his teeth gleam. His name, he tells me, is Boots.
At the airport, there are flights around the clock, anytime you want. Flights to other islands, with hedge mazes or photo studios or towns mid-sprout much like mine. But when I ask for a ticket to the mainland, they don’t understand.
I clap for the gate agent while he works on his computer. I shout words of encouragement at him. There’s a rumor, whispered to me by neighbors, that if you make him blush, he’ll chart the flight route to an island growing rare fruit trees or hybrid flowers, or one populated by hundreds of terrifying and valuable arachnids. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. But he doesn’t offer me a way home.
Where do you want to go? he asks, as though it’s up to me, as though there isn’t a list, two destinations long, that I must choose from.
I give Boots a pair of boots I fished up from the river. If I’d presented one on its own, he would’ve called it trash and handed it back, but as a pair, they are a brilliant gift. A ram sells me a knit hat. A wolf with fur like a cloud teaches me how to shiver in fear. A red duck declares she’s going to be famous, but I don’t know what fame means on the island.
All week, the residents anticipate Saturday night, when a dog will play guitar for us. There is no greater celebrity than this dog. I wonder if all the other islands know of him. I wonder where he goes when he leaves, what he does in the time between this concert and the next. I imagine my mom driving me around the island, pointing to apples fallen from trees or a handful of red pansies, convinced—or trying to convince me—It’s that duck, that famous red duck.
The day shudders to dark and I go home, where my mailbox blinks patiently. Another letter from my mom, or someone claiming to be her. I want to send a coded message in response, to sniff out who’s on the other end, but I can’t write her back, my letters all routed to fellow island residents or other islands I’ve visited.
I climb the stairs to my bedroom, furnished with all I’ve made of my days here: my cushion of mums, painted red. Speakers wired with cherry stems. My bed built from giant clams, its pillow a pearl. My clocks made of pears. My bathtub in the shape of a bull.
I think of the alligator in my hometown, wonder if the wilderness of the golf course felt like a palace to him or a trap, if he wanted to leave but the roads and neighborhoods stretching in all directions felt like untraversable ocean. What was the name the papers gave him? Alfonso? Drago? Boots? I wish I could remember. I would ask my mom if I knew how. I miss her. I miss my hometown. I’m so, so tired of the island.
I approach the side of the tub and examine its hooves and horns, sculpted from gleaming gold. I peer into its basin of a back. I want to fill it with water and sink in, to terraform myself into an island, the day’s filth scaffolding my skin like shovel-carved cliffs. But I can’t climb in. I keep walking toward it but never quite touch the edge.