Kimm Brockett Stammen

January 2026 | fiction

Waves

The ship wasn’t rocking, still there was a sensation of lilting movement,

of repeated unbalancing and rebalancing,

as she leaned over the railing and reached out to the waves far below.

The instant before he approached, she felt that someone would approach.

He, on the other hand, as he said later, barely knew what was happening, before, during or after.

Their spouses were generally the planners.

Like all their vacations, her husband and his wife had arranged the cruise.

Their spouses didn’t plan this.

The four of them met at horse shoes on the second day, and since then had done much together: dined on huge Scampi, explored overrun harbor towns, laughed sparsely at a comedy show. A continent separated the two couples, but attitude and circumstance made them compatible, and also, as is always the case with compatibility: values. They believed in love and loyalty, and had thought the two as complementary as sea and sky, past and future.  On each of their monogamies depended entire infrastructures of children, families, careers, houses, investments, vacations, pets, landscapings, plans.

“Beautiful,” he said as he leant next to her against the railing.

And she knew he meant the evening and the ocean,

the breeze and the sensation of floating far from the tethering land—

but she also knew, or hoped, or knew what was meant by her hoping, that he meant her.

They fell in love.

They fell in love and they loved.

They fell in love and they loved and there seemed to be no choice at all.

Is there ever?

Ten years later, in a hotel in a midwestern city, where they could each stop over occasionally on the way to elsewhere, they were naked together. Even as memory, their nakedness always stunned: a green flash of recognition at sunset or sunrise; a breech from ocean sleep; a perpetual instant of waking.  They talked over once and again all their inevitable subjects: commitment, hopelessness, incongruence, boat-rocking. How their infrastructures—teens and young adults, aging parents, retirements, downsizings, dividends, vacations, small mounds interspersed in their landscapes, more plans—continued, and yet they two who supported those infrastructures were infinitely different. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they been these people all along, these awful people, and had just needed each other to learn it.

“It’s time,” she said, and he knew before she said it that she would say it.

She, on the other hand, barely knew what she was saying.

Still, they took other cruises, there were other lilting sensations, sometimes they reached out, or remembered reaching out, or sensed that they would—unbalancing and rebalanced—reach out from their opposite sides of the continent, to the waves.

Kimm Brockett Stammen

Kimm Brockett Stammen’s story collection, In a Country Whose Language I Have Never Mastered, was a finalist for the Iron Horse Book Contest and the 2022 Eludia Award. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, december, CARVE, Pembroke, Prime Number, and over thirty other literary magazines, and her work has been nominated for Pushcart, Best Short Fiction, and Best Microfiction anthologies. She holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University. kimmbrockettstammen.wordpress.com