it had been hot for weeks sticky humid heat like the clouds were breathing angrily then dry, papery heat as though the sun shone through a magnifying glass and all the gravel driveways were on fire we burned, swimsuits creating a patchwork of skin and took to swimming in the Puget Sound at sunset the breathtaking cold startling, taking our skinny legs and young backs by surprise like heat off the desert sand when we, gingerly at first, tested the water with our feet and toes then grew bold, and leapt off of things making sea birds beat a flushed retreat I’d hover amidst the mercury water of tranquil blues and blood oranges swallowed in the panoramic throat of sky and watch as the brilliant sun drowned silently surrounded by stains of alto strattus my own limbs mere waves pale spectrum blurred in between the feathery silhouettes of fir trees on the horizon floating next to innocents like driftwood fluid sunsets dripping off my lips and nose into the strata of ocean-stranded stars quivering slightly beneath the surface we’d swim out far, urgently towards the opposite horizon past the buoys past the boats past the bottom-anchored kelp until oblivious jellyfish got too close then we’d follow the waves back to shore then I’d sit on the sandbar where the water was shallow and bend with the incoming current shuddering when the seaweed wrapped around my ankles and hands I felt God breathing displayed calmly around this immaculate peripheral vision this was too much for our blood to hold in someone had always managed to cut themselves on a barnacle or piece of broken shell and left red tracks across the rocks on the way back to the car