The Sea

MACKENZIE BRANSON is an editor at JuxtaProse and has a degree in English and creative writing. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and four children.

MY UNCLE WAS a boxer, and the brutality of the sport made me nervous around him. That, and he always greeted me the same way, by squeezing that part of my leg where thigh meets knee. And I mean squeezed—well past the point of a tickle, his laugh too loud. It hurt; how could he not know it hurt? Maybe he did. In any case, he taught me something: to smile instead of squirm, to pretend to like it, and he’d let me go sooner.

my eighth-grade year, I was called out of class and told to go to the front office. My mother was there, in her work clothes. She was a county prosecutor in a traditional community, a job that made for wild dinner conversations and made her different from my friends’ mothers, who (if they worked outside the home at all) were teachers or secretaries—ladylike occupations. I was around my mom’s office enough to notice that the place was full of women: receptionists and secretaries for each of the seven attorneys (all men, but my mom, and then later one other female prosecutor). Those women took orders, but my mom was different because she made the demands. One night at dinner, she gleefully told us she’d been called a four-eyed bitch in court that day. Sometimes she