"Dive Log" by Kt Amrine

Hey dogs? Did you know this is our FIRST creative nonfiction piece? Eat your heart out, fiction writers, you're not the only prose nerd on the block. Kt is such a fantastic writer and we're so glad to have the ability to publish their work! Maybe you'll see more of her soon... :)

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Got to the location too early. Had to sit in the waiting room before being led back to the dive site by a nice middle-aged nurse. She called me “Kathryn” and I didn’t correct her. Then she asked me “what brings you in today” and I handed her over the physical form; told her only really needed a signature saying I was good to scuba dive for class. “Scuba diving!” she gasped. “That’s going to be so fun. What year are you?” “Senior,” I said, “I don’t even really need the credits, I just thought it would be fun.” She started typing on the computer. “That’s the best time to do it!” She stopped talking and I decided today was a good day for a dive, so I said, “Actually, my dad—” and before checking the tanks or anything I plunged into the water with the next word, put on my scuba mask and adjusted my tense without the nurse noticing there was even a diving location there in the office—“has his diving certification. So that’s kind of why I wanted to do it.” The nurse was standing, now, and ripped the velcro of the blood pressure cuff while I slipped my arm out of my wetsuit. She didn’t seem to notice how far underwater I was. She clicked her tongue. She smiled. “Oh, that’s going to be so fun! That way you two can—” 

Down on that ocean floor, I saw two blurs of divers in the distance. Air trailed from both their masks and bubbled up to the surface of the water. One was noticeably bigger than the other, and his bald head was tinted blue with the distance between us. The smaller one’s dark hair swirled around her head and clouded her mask. She swiped it away with her hands while the bigger one pointed to a school of tropical fish, shimmering in the water. I don’t know what color they were. The fish, the divers—they were all saturated blue. A large gasp of bubbles emerged from the smaller one. They both turned their masks towards each other, then back again at the fish. 

“—Oh goodness, I love that!” I felt a finger on my arm. The nurse pointed to my tattoo on my elbow, a luna moth. She had fished me out by the blood pressure cuff, and against regulations, completely ignored my need for a safety stop. I looked down at the tattoo with her, cursed it for bringing me back up to Earth, and said, “thank you.” She continued: “You know, my daughter has tattoos—she’s got this one behind her ear…” and I was listening despite my nitrogen sickness: the splitting headache. The nausea. The grief sinking into my gut like a dead fish.

Kt Amrine is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama where she reads and edits for Black Warrior Review. She earned her BA in creative writing from Denison University. Their previous work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in fifth wheel press’s digital anthology light ‘em up.  

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