You know what I love most about swimming?  How perky my breasts get.  All round and full and buoyant.  Gorgeous, really!  And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.

My husband tells me not to worry.  He still sees me perfect.

“What?  When your eyes are closed?”

“Well, I don’t have to close my eyes.”

“I’m just saying . . . .” he says, when I give him that look.

He tries.

But I know what he means, this man who is fast turning into his father the older he grows.  And his father!  That skinny, scrawny, bald-headed buzzard was never much to look at, even when we met.  Certainly nothing like his son, whom I’m telling you, was hot enough to burn rubber back then.

But that’s not how I see him now.  Not as his father, and not as he was when we first said I do.

There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it.  You just aren’t there anymore.  That person in the mirror?  Not me now.  Not sure where I am.  Hovering somewhere around the body maybe.  But more outside than in.  And him, too.  This man I married.

Now what I see now is not a body, but a being.  A living, thinking, breathing being who just happens to fit perfectly into my arms.  Someone I want to grow old with.  And not just till-death-do-you-part old.   But old.  As in ancient.

Man-in-the-moon old.  Mountains melting into the sea, old.  Earth spinning off its axis, old.  Starships dodging dark holes, novae bursting into newness. . . . you see what I mean.

Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe. That’s how I see us.

Deborah Brasket lives on the central coast of California where she watches the wild turkeys fly down from the trees in the morning and listens to coyotes howl at night. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in Cobalt Review, Unchartered Frontiers, and Bareback Lit.  You can find more of her work on her work atwww.djbrasket.com and on her blog “Living on the Edge of the Wild” at http://deborahbrasket.wordpress.com.