An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick Page B

the rug.

CHAPTER 1
    P EARL FELL THROUGH THE WATER.
    Pearl let out her breath in little bubbles that rose above her as she watched. She had no end of breath; she did not panic.
    The ocean, Pearl thought, is empty but full, like the empty sky that is full with air. She closed her eyes and remembered the air, remembered as she held her breath; she felt no need to breathe. She fell through the water remembering the shadows of cottonwood fluff on the sidewalk, remembered looking up and seeing the seeds floating in the air, so light they didn’t seem to fall; she remembered seeing the small shadows of the cottonwood seeds on the sidewalk darkened by a larger shadow in which the tree disappeared, remembered looking up and seeing clouds. She stood in their shadows and remembered that the clouds took shapes.
    A mouse with its front paws pressed together; a fox curved within the curl of its tail; a polar bear scratching its back against a tree; a horse growing wings; an owl hunting; a whale whose tail grew dark as it descended, that grew brilliantly white as it arched back over its body, flukes spreading out. Pearl remembered that when the white whale widened it darkened, too; she remembered when it swam overhead. The whale’s thoughtsrumbled through the world and then the rain began to fall, it shook from its body all the water as it breached over the earth—rain falling in pellets that knocked the cottonwood seeds from the air. Pearl remembered that the whale dove back into itself; it was its own element, its own ocean. It dove into itself and began to disappear: owl folding its wings against its body; horse nestling into the invisible grass; bear hiding its head beneath its paws; fox curling its tail tighter around its body until it becomes the mouse scurrying into itself instead of a hole. Then the sky was calm and blue. The sun dried the ground. The sun a perfect pearl falling across the sky. Pearl remembered seeing the cottonwood seeds in shadow and then looking up to see them floating again in the air.
    Pearl’s mother wandered through the house, rubbing the hem of her dress between her thumb and finger as she walked. When she sat down she rubbed the cuff of her sleeve; she ran her hand unconsciously along the table’s edge; she rubbed her leg against the chair’s leg. Everything has an edge, she thought, except what is round. She thought about the lost pearl and then she thought about Pearl, and in her distraction the two thoughts slowly merged: Pearl looking at her from her bedroom and those were pearls that were eyes, the sun on the pearls that were Pearl’s eyes, a shadow on the face of the pearl that was Pearl’s face, the pearlescent sheen of a ghost and the ghost had Pearl’s shape. And when the two thoughts had fully merged, when the lost pearland her daughter were a single thought, her mother stifled a cry; she felt some space, ocean-wide, ocean-deep, open within her, and she felt as if she were drowning in herself. She could not escape. The moon was above her in the night, a pearl in the starless dark, a single pearl in the night’s black box, the night that has an edge it hides from our eyes, the night that is dark so that its edge will not show. But sometimes the moon falls off the edge; when a child pulls it from its box, the moon will sometimes fall off the edge—and as Pearl’s mother thought this thought, the moon went out, the moon above the ocean in which she floated went out, not gradually growing smaller, not dimming into nothing, just blinking off, gone.
    Pearl’s mother stood up from the table and walked to her daughter’s room. The door was closed. She opened it. There was the space where her daughter had lain down pressed into the sea-blue quilt.
    The room was quiet but not silent. She could hear a rhythmic sound, it filled the room, a sound almost not a sound, a presence, as the ocean unseen in the night is a presence, rolling up on the shore and