This Moment

 Nola doesn’t meet Venice until midnight. These days people don’t start moving around until six or seven in the evening. Sometimes it’s later, depending on how high the temperature soars in the early part of the day and how slow the mercury creeps down in the back half. Today is a bad day, in the sense that the temp hits well over one hundred and takes until ten to come down to eighty-seven.

By the time Nola starts out, it’s a balmy eighty-four degrees, and she’s sweating when she reaches the old park. She heaves a sigh of relief at the sight of Venice in a swing and holding the painted chain of a second, marking it strictly off limits to the hordes of small children swarming over the slides and jungle gym. They are whirls of color, their small wrists and necks drenched in green, purple, and red glow sticks as they run wild in the half moon’s light. The few parents present—they must have drawn straws for park duty, and these are the losers—sit on old benches and trade war stories or read magazines with assistance from headlamps. 

Venice lets go of the second swing as Nola plops down on the seat. She’s wearing her university sweatshirt, their school’s name a beacon on the navy fabric. Nola has one just like it, only it’s too hot to wear now. Venice took care of that problem by hacking off the sleeves and bottom half of hers; the tiny pearl in her navel glints as a kid runs by. 

“How’re you doing?” Nola asks as they kick their swings into motion. 

Venice snorts. “Better than my namesake. You?” 

“Same.” 

It’s an old joke—others might call it cruel—that they’ve shared ever since learning they were named for cities long lost to the rising seas. 

“You get your robe yet?” Venice asks. She slows her swing, trying to match Nola’s rhythm. 

“Gown. And yeah, I picked it up yesterday.” 

They’re moving in tandem now, back and forth, back and forth. They don’t go very high. The swings are old, and just last month a kid flew off and broke his nose. Nola and Venice agree the injury was the kid’s fault; he was probably showing off for friends and figured he’d land on his feet after a string of successful flight attempts from other heights. Needless to say, the kid’s parents disagreed, and the swings were wrapped in prohibiting tape for three weeks afterward. 

Nola pumps her legs to gain a tad more height. “Did you hear back on the Jersey thing?” 

“Boston,” Venice corrects, and the tightness in her voice says she hasn’t. “But I’m not even sure about it anymore.” 

“How come?” 

She takes a moment to respond, eyes trained straight ahead as she wills her swing higher. “I sort of went overboard looking into their weather patterns.”

Nola doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that. She’d be worried if her friend hadn’t considered the climate in her possible new locale. “Smart.”

“I thought you knew.” 

Nola laughs at the mock offense in her friend’s voice. “So? What’d you find out?”

Venice stares at the streaks of multicolored light zipping down the plastic slides. She’s stopped kicking her legs now, and the quick pace they’ve set stutters and starts to slow. Nola’s toes drag in the rubber shavings under the swing set. 

“That everywhere has its thing,” Venice says, her voice soft. “You know?” 

Nola squeezes the swing’s chains. “Worse than here?” 

Her friend lifts one shoulder and drops it. “No. I don’t know. It’s just different.”

“Different how?” 

“Well, snow, for one thing. The whole state gets it. And there’s a lot more rain.” 

They aren’t swinging anymore. Venice clears her throat wetly, and Nola looks away and at her toes. She digs them into the shavings, the tops of her sneakers disappearing under the dark strips. Across the park, a woman bops her headlamp’s light with the fat of her palm as the bulb flickers. A kid’s high voice counts to twenty. Laughter reaches them, sudden and bright and disorienting.

Venice starts, shaking her head as she realizes how still everything has become. She tugs at the cropped hem of her sweatshirt. “I’ll have to update my wardrobe, if I go.” 

“Maybe you can sew the other parts of it back on,” Nola quips. 

“So funny.” She starts to swing again, slowly at first, distracted. “You’re still going to Tennessee, right?” 

“Yeah,” Nola says, following her lead and putting her own swing in motion. “Shouldn’t have to worry about… Well, there’s fewer things to worry about.” 

Venice nods, pushing her swing so high her head points at the ground. 

Neither of them needs a reminder of the frightening images that come across the TV with more and more frequency. It’s early June—fire season hasn’t even officially started—and already there are three separate fires burning in different parts of the state. Last year, during that stretch from November to March that locals call the wet season, the daily newsreel highlighted mudslides and floods. In the places that get snow, the white stuff came down by the truckload, a fortress sculpted by Mother Nature. 

“You think it’ll trigger a tsunami?” Venice asks. “The big one?” 

Nola closes her eyes as her swing climbs higher. “I don’t know.” 

“Dude, we’re so far overdue for it.” 

“Dude,” Nola returns, stressing the word, “please don’t talk like that. We both still very much live here.”

But she’s in it now. The worst-case scenarios roll behind her eyes like B footage. “You think it would hit NorCal or SoCal?” 

“Hopefully neither.”

“NorCal’s, like, been through a lot already. I mean, Sac floods every year now. And we can’t forget SF in 1906.”

“V,” Nola says, her voice tight. 

“Has California ever had a tsunami?” 

“Not that I know of, but the last thing we should be doing is sitting here manifesting one.” 

Those words reach her. Venice stops kicking; her swing starts to slow and fall. 

“Anyway, I’m not trying to be here for the potential first,” Nola says. There’s finality in her voice. “That’s why I’m—we’re—leaving. We just have to get those pieces of paper, and then we’re off to our new lives.”

Their swings are still. They watch a group of children, gleeful and shrill, as they play freeze tag. A girl fakes to the left as the tagger closes in on her, but he catches her in the end. She freezes with her face turned to the sky, mouth open, mid-scream. 

Nola looks up at the chains of her swing and starts to twist in a slow circle. Venice sees what she’s doing and follows her lead. As they wind their swings’ chains together, Venice asks about kids. 

“What about them?” 

“You think they’ll be part of your new life?” 

Nola stops twisting, and Venice does the same. They stare at each other, toes buried in the rubber shavings as they fight the force of the swings wanting to unwind. One of the kids in the freeze tag group dives to avoid being tagged, then starts to howl as he lifts his head. He screams for his mom.

Nola winces at the sound. 

“I don’t know,” she finally says. “It seems like a lot.”

“Everything’s a lot.” 

“Yeah, but that would be a lot on top of a lot.”

“So, like, too much?” Venice asks. 

Nola narrows her eyes. Before she can stop herself, her gaze drops to Venice’s exposed midriff. “Are you…?”

“No,” she says. “Not now.” 

“But you want to be? At some point?” 

Venice looks towards the playground. “I don’t know. Maybe.” 

Over in the thin grass where the boy fell, his mother drags him upright by one arm. She’s the one whose headlamp was dying earlier. She bops it again, trying to get the light to shine on her son’s dirt-streaked face. 

Nola says, “How long do you think he’s got?” 

Venice watches the mother fuss over her son some more. “Before she starts yelling at him?” 

“To live.” 

Now Venice looks at her. “That’s morbid.” 

“In this world?” Nola starts winding her swing up again. “Is it?”

Venice grabs Nola’s arm as she works. “Things could get better.” 

“You want to bring kids into a world that could get better? You really want something—someone—else to worry about?”

“But isn’t that what everyone’s done, historically? Aren’t we always trying to make things better for the next generation?” 

“All due respect,” Nola says, and Venice sighs because it’s one of those phrases that means the exact opposite of what it says, “do you see a lot of people trying to make things better or people just trying to survive?” 

She picks up her feet then, and Venice tugs her swing to the side as Nola spins and spins and spins. As a kid, she’d scream in pleasure as she spun. Now, she stays silent, watching as Venice’s face moves in and out of view, as the lights worn by kids and parents alike blur and streak past. When her swing faces forward again, she moves to the side so Venice can spin. She does, and she’s just as silent. The only difference is the tears on her face when she comes to a rest. 

“Life isn’t just about survival,” she says. “It shouldn’t be.” 

Nola looks out at the park, the kids still playing, the parents still doing parent things. She reaches over and takes her friend’s hand. “No,” she says. “It shouldn’t be.” 

Venice squeezes her eyes closed. A few more tears sneak out. She rubs her face on her shoulder. “Fuck,” she whispers. 

“You okay?” 

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

She bites her lip. “I really wish we hadn’t taken that ethics class.” 

At first, Nola doesn’t know how to respond. Then the laughter comes, hard and fast. Venice’s befuddlement only makes her laugh harder. She falls out of the swing; she’s laughing so hard. That starts Venice laughing. 

People are probably looking, judging. Maybe they think they’re high or drunk or both. They probably wish they weren’t at the park at the same time as them. They’re probably gathering their things to go. 

Let them. 

They need this moment.