Kumla

Emily sat uncomfortably in the old bamboo chair and shuffled her legs for the seventh time in what old people would consider a short amount of time, maybe five minutes. She tried not to lean on the glass surface of the matching bamboo table, which was getting darker at certain corners, highlighting the needle-slim iron nails that were once so carefully knocked into the bamboo by a meticulous artisan; wondering whether the glass panel was ever had to be replaced. This table had been in this particular balcony for as long as she knew herself – she had also seen photos of her mom being pregnant with her, shyly smiling at the camera with a youthfully sheer face right next to it. Actually, she had seen so many family photos with this table in the center that, if some extraterrestrial saw these photos, he would have thought the table was a part of the family, she thought: Some ancient, never-moving family member that was much respected, yet spent the winters alone under two layers of sheets. Aside from questions as to one’s progeny, the table was pretty much a great grandmother to all. As far as the various family photo albums went, the great grandmother seemed to like watermelon (cut into perfect triangles, clearly with the help of some OCD-induced magical hands), fresh feta cheese, olive oil drenched mezes and occasionally, some raki.  

Four bamboo chairs with puffy, one-piece cushions were around the rectangular table; also in the way they always stood there. On the cushions’ surface, some type of Southeast Asian tropical jungle print was going on – or at least someone’s idea of a Southeast Asian tropical jungle. The fabric was something between a canvas and a holland: it felt comfortable when you first sat down, but gradually pressed deeper into your skin as you settled in – and was sure to leave a light print on your thighs by the time you got back up. Two of the chairs stood at the short ends of the table, the other two rose right next to each other at the one open long end. The other long end was rested safely on the waist tall wall of the balcony. Five or six old fashioned blinds took up where the wall ended; these were adjusted all depending on where the sun was at that specific time of the day. The morning was the best time to be on the balcony, when the rays didn’t make it in, but shone all around it, making it a cool, serene hideout from what Emily felt as the rest of the world. Come 1 PM, it felt like the balcony had its own private sun that shone right into it, however, far from pleasant to even a most sun-deprived, excited-for-the-summer soul. It would get back to being somewhat nice around 3.30 PM – a time when the neighborhood women liked to get together and chit chat about how unbearably humid the day was, whether they would start making jams soon, or what fish was about to be in season, and what was be the best way to serve the poor thing. As hard as the settlements were, each subject proved plentiful for a leisurely early PM conversation, and one would be beyond mistaken to think these were easy decisions.

The fish came from the very sea that lied beyond the balcony after a narrow boardwalk, and an even narrower coastline that the local municipality didn’t know what to do with.  The rumor had it that it used to be all Cleopatra-status sand back thirty years ago, before the earthquake, before the gypsies started buying off the cheap high rises on the hills, and before the now 20-somethings would be actually excited to visit their grandparents in this small seaside town than go down to the Mediterranean coast and do drugs with their friends, who happened to be someone else’s grandchildren on the same block. Most of the children who spent a good portion of their summer holidays in this undesirable sea (frequent swimmers were either little kids that didn’t give a shit or pensioners with a particular keenness on swimming at 7 in the morning with a no better place to go) proved emotionally unreliable adults with attachment issues, some of whom (Emily was among them) blamed the recurring issues on the industrial toxic waste released by the mega factories ashore on the west coast. Anyhow, ever since the earthquake, the sea has had taken back most of what used to be the sandy coast. Local government men with vibrant moustache tried to fight against it by bringing truckfulls of sand from God-knows-where and dumping it onto the coast, but the sea kept taking the sand back. A decade or so later, what once used to be the coast turned into a foot wrecking, pebble laden string. The depth was so uneven that some locals ended up building bland cement ladders where you could climb down. Others remained in denial, and carried their red-and-white straw foldable chairs to the remnant of the coast, and made sure to take a pair of reliable sea sandals as personal measurement.

Come to think of it, the sea was distasteful regardless of the heavy chemical waste: Boreas would clean the regular human trash up: plastic bottles, wafer wrappers, half eaten watermelon wedges, car tires – all the familiar, summery crap that your eyes would get used to in a minute. And the questionably dense algae, which Emily now rationalized as the poor bay’s way of fighting the industrial toxics off. Oh, and the sewage of the entire town, flooding into the water through thick cement bowels 3 or 4 kilometers off of the shore. Yet the moment you thought the sea looked surprisingly clean that day, you would start seeing them. At first one or two, then groups of ten, finally, for as much as your eyes can see under the midday sun: Those milky white, shapelessly circular, translucent creatures with what resembled to four square-like eyes in the center: the jellyfish. Like humans that overpopulated the boardwalk at nighttime, they seemed to come in all shapes and sizes too, short, tall, fat, slender, even athletic-built. Some were more cylindrical and flashier with electric purple or orange tentacles in the center – these also gleamed the same colors on their borders, with unreliable low voltage electricity. As pretty as they were, you were supposed to avoid them at all cost, as they electrocuted you with a shock that was similar to a leakage from a bargain-priced Made in China coffee maker. Whether they were actually electrically charged or it was some type of sting still remained a mystery to Emily.

Then there was the lodos, which meant no jellyfish, but swimming in the midst of all the cacophony that would drift away with boreas. Either, or.

Emily looked at the now bronze and gray sea and blinked. Above and beyond, life went on.