SmokeLong Quarterly

In a landlocked basement apartment, I dreamed of the sea. On my nonprofit salary, the little flat beside the post office was Eden. Some psychedelic former resident had painted birds and ivy on every wall. Spanish tile cheered a kitchen small enough for me to put my feet in the refrigerator from the table. An inexplicable flight of stairs led to a wall, forming a storage triangle for my insulin pump supplies.

But all six hundred square feet were underground. Even when I beseeched the sun to press its cheek to my bay window, my home was fit for hibernation or harboring fugitives. There was only one solution.

I would pretend it was a beach house.

You can recruit a thriving congregation of whelks and nautiluses for under nine dollars. If you catch the Benjamin Moore man in a good mood, halfway through his ham sandwich, he will give you a little tureen of iridescent paint for free. He will give you more if you greet him as “Benny M. the local gem” on your second visit.

Yard sales are salty with the Lenox sailboats of a hundred bathrooms. I am convinced God Almighty planted the ecstatic resin fisherman in Goodwill for me to find. I am not convinced he is not a promotional item from Gorton’s. Prolonged exposure to Jimmy Buffett’s oeuvre will improve your latitude.

For under one hundred dollars, a diabetic girl who works at a cat sanctuary can turn a bunker into Sicily, or at least the Jersey shore.

There was just one thing missing. I needed a shell unearthed by my own fingers.

“Can’t you bring a friend?” My mother has spoken this incantation since I was a toddler asking if I could walk to the Sunday School room without a chaperone. She grew up on Sheepshead Bay, where my police captain grandfather told stories of derelicts and disembodied heads. My mother believes that every Chipotle and cul-de-sac is full of terrors.

“This is something I need to do.” My mother’s daughter has only ever lived in suburbs, where the greatest dangers are a Bath & Body Works lotion that smells like high school, and pet store employees who promise “this gerbil is NOT pregnant.”

Even if I shared my mother’s vigilance, some quests are necessary. I befriended the Turnpike. I pretended I was every girl Bruce Springsteen ever sang about. I agreed with him that I was “not a beauty, but hey, you’re alright.” I took melodramatic selfies at the Cheesequake Rest Area. I took notes for a short story about a historic Cheesequake throttling the tectonic plates of provolone. I stopped at a diner for mozzarella sticks.

I made it to Sandy Hook. I took fifty-two identical photographs of the same seagull. I joined an elementary school tour group to a lighthouse. I paid eighteen dollars on the boardwalk for an airbrushed tee reading “Jersey Goddess.” I found out I do not particularly enjoy getting wet. I found the mollusk meant for my palm. I drove home infatuated with my experience. I wrote a thank-you card to Bruce Springsteen for his companionship. I texted my mother to confirm that I had not died.