Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé is a professor of Comparative Literature and English at Tulane University, and the author of A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein (UChicago Press, 2020), and co-editor of Wittgenstein and Modernism (UChicago Press, 2017), and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Philosophy (forthcoming 2026). She is currently completing a new book, The Vanities of Wisdom.  Zumhagen-Yekplé has been awarded fellowships from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford, and from the Stanford Humanities Center, and am a recipient of a Louisiana Board of Regents Award to Louisiana Artists and Scholars. 

Salthill

By Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

It was June. It was truth or dare. It was both. The woman in a green swimsuit chose a sandy beach from among the stony, the one with the clearest fades of blue. She piled her clothes on a rock, weighed them down with an ashen jar, slouched towards the shore, dread-treaded in up to her waist, and stood breathless in 52 degrees of windy water.

Then she dove.

She surfaced, drew in a whole gust of wind in one raspy gulp, then spat it out in seven little knives of seven terrible oaths. Whispered oaths, close and tense and quiet. So as not to unsettle the three or so mortal creatures already circling slowly among the gelid waves.

No sharks these, but dauntless locals, moving ritually under some ancient protection—Druid or Marian, she smiled—that didn’t cover her. Or else preserved by whatever selkie pinguidity that she, strange, stunned pilgrim, had not through mere bloodline accrued.

In up to her neck now, she stood still, feet on the sandy bottom, scalp and hands ringing with the cold. And suddenly in a slap of stinging reason (or balmy hyperbole), she wondered: just how long can a person stay in frigid waters before she starts to die a little?  Like going to sleep in a Russian short story or something out of Jack London. The lonely self in the tale already knows what everybody knows about the predicaments of exposure: falling asleep is the one thing you just can’t do.

And you, the reader, are as chilled turning those pages as you, the water treader, are right now, standing there, chin-deep in the glassy drink, already knowing that one same damn thing we all learn along the way: that there is some kind of (freezing) point a person can reach where even knowing what she’s supposed to know can’t compel a numb will to wake up and get out.

Right then a second woman in a very red bathing cap came jogging brightly in from the beach Greensuit had spun back to face. And here this woman was now, lunging forward, a blurry figure too vivid,

cutting through the water too fast, in shaky out-of-sync frames from a restored home movie, viewed out of time. Redcap hit the water legsbellychest and shrieked. And as she came at her howling, Greensuit laughed and called out to her: “hey listen, I’ve been screaming silently inside my wintry head, and thankgod here you come, wailing out loud like my own lost voice.” And Redcap responded: “Sometimes you’ve just got to scream!  Life so rarely gives you a chance! Right, I know, I know. But trust me, even the gravest rites beget cliches!”

So then together the two screamed out every hot breath in their bodies.

And then without transition, they each floated away from their accidental intimacy, gliding separately round and round, in the icy summer bay, Redcap speaking all the while now, not so much to Greentogs as to every random bathing lunatic present: “oh but isn’t it warm today?  Isn’t it just lovely, isn’t it just gorgeous, isn’t it just beautiful?”

And it was. And feeling certain that it was, Greensuit swam around for half an hour more in clear cold blue-green-blue, through the sometime kelp above soft sands.

Then she returned to the rocks. And, leaving her clothes to fend for themselves, she took that jar of her mother’s ashes and carried it out into the waves.

Then she held her breath, knelt down, and let those waves cover her over.

She said a prayer for her mother that she made up on the spot.

Because she just couldn’t plan for this.