“Displacement” by Gabriel da Silva-Schicchi
The pool water glowed as though a small child had taken toy scissors and cut a fanciful shape out of the cement, revealing the incandescent teal beneath. The surface was filmed with the reflection of the lights along the motel’s open-air hallways and, if Maria looked closely, the stars. More stars, certainly, than she had ever seen in San Francisco; more, even, than in the skies above the last few towns they’d settled in. Since her father had lost his business, it seemed the farther they traveled from home, the closer they were to those stars.
Maria lounged three rows of chairs removed from the pool so that she saw only a sliver of it. Her mind, exhausted from a day spent shifting fitfully on the hot upholstery of the backseat, diverted itself by swapping the pool’s colors with those of the sky, so that an oppressive desert of bright, wobbling pool water blanketed the motel and the surrounding highways and exit towns, while on the ground shone a shard of ominous blue.
As Maria’s blood slowed and her head began to loll, the shard of sky began dragging in the world around it: the lounge chairs, the family of palm trees that marked the entrance to the motel parking lot. Then the motel itself shook and crumbled and, piecemeal, was compelled under. The chlorine sky sagged, its tenuous surface dripping at first, and then pouring out as though from a faucet until the heavens were a flat, dirty cement bottom of an emptied pool.
And then that too showed cracks, which turned to chasms, and soon crumbling cement was raining down into the thin sliver of night. The dried soil beyond it followed, and then the solid bedrock, the silty mantle of the earth, and the molten iron at its core. The gravity the earth had produced for billions of years collapsed, and Maria felt her body levitate off the lounge chair, set adrift into the void, into the enormity of America.
“Shhh,” said a voice. “Let’s get you into bed.”
The beardy prickle of her father pressed against her forehead. He carried her slowly up the slick cement stairs to their room, reassuring her that the very next day, they’d get to see their exciting new home.
Gabriel da Silva-Schicchi is a Brazilian-American writer based in Washington, DC, where he studies fiction at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. His stories have appeared in Arcturus, Capsule Stories, and The Coil. He is currently looking for a home for his tragicomic novel about country musicians lost in Rio.
