‘Look up', her cancer counsellor has said repeatedly. ‘Look up and change your perspective, Gwen.' 

 

Everything stings. Her body is discomfort. 

 

Gwen grimaces at the jungle canopy, the foliage obscuring the tropical sun, as she snags her pants on volcanic rock and bangs her shin. Thick air lines her lungs and a dead robber crab shell cracks underfoot. Her ankles and forearms are irritated by dozens of paper-thin cuts from sly pandanus leaves, left to flick like razors on her skin by the enthusiastic hikers ahead. Gary is at the front.   

 

Lurching forwards to the bottom of the steep gully, the dale encounters the low-tide ocean, sulking flat against the exposed coral. The rocks are bruised purple with lichen and bandalite. At the sight of the ocean, a flurry of activity from the fit and earnest pushes Gwen to the side and she hangs back as they lunge across the rock pools to plunge into the lukewarm water. 

 

Gwen stays still in the curl of an eroded rock wall, watching them thrash away. She slaps mosquitoes into blooded trails on her skin and wipes repellent into her sweaty, squinting eyes.

 

Maybe if she waits long enough, Gary will forget she remains here, and she can be alone. Quiet. Left to think for the first time in seven months of treatment. The rushing, the urgency, the curt nurses, the oncologist delivering head-tilted news, their children farmed out to school friends while Gary flew down to bring her vomiting form to and from the island, the casseroles and bolognaise overflowing their deep freezer. The scar tissue where both breasts used to be.  

 

‘Gwen! Come on!' Gary calls from the water. ‘Get in! You've come this far.'

 

She scratches at her mastectomy scars listlessly, itchy from the sweat tricking down from her neck. She exhales, reluctant, and adjusts her mask, jamming the black plastic of the snorkel in her mouth. Picking her way across the slick rocks – trying hard to avoid the dark sea urchin spikes - she startles a lionfish trapped in a rockpool. It flares, defiant. 

‘Gwen!' 

 

She slips her fins on, resting on lumpy lichen, then pushes off into the murky water. Gary said the hike and snorkel would be ‘good for her soul'. Gwen exhales sharply. Sea lice prickle her exposed neck and she scratches, trying to escape their bites.

 

Unable to extend her arms as straight as she used to, Gwen begins to paddle the way she did as a child, limbs rotating underwater. The skin in her armpits pulls and irritates. The surgery scars cord and irk, creating a struggle on the surface of her body: inside, she wishes to be supple and gentle once more. Saltstream washes through her bathers, where the bust lies empty, the fabric collecting ripples and shifting in the tumult of her hands. No breast tissue remains to fill the elastic; the material drifts, hollow. Mid-paddle, her thumb catches in the black lycra and twists painfully. 

 

Ahead there is a bustle of ‘Hey! Hey!' from the group and Gary signals to her. ‘Come!' he bellows, like a child. ‘Quick!' 

 

A flash of irritation stabs through Gwen's chest as she rolls onto her back. The frigatebirds circling overhead match the churn of her anger. ‘Damn you, Gary!' she spits to the hoary sky. 

 

A silence drifts down from the broad-whirling birds and Gwen feels a shift. Calm wraps around her midsection, as a current of frigid water glides beneath her body. The others are silent for the first time in the day. Thankful, Gwen rotates her body to face the ocean floor and sees the sand flurry below her. Spiracles extend above the large circle that has buried itself beneath her, only a few metres away. 

 

Gary is calling but he seems further away than before. He is gesturing above his head wildly, but Gwen feels no urgency. Only peace. She breathes through her snorkel and gazes on the stingray as the sand stills around its tabular form. 

 

Then, the stingray rises in helix, swimming only for Gwen, circling in ever-increasing rings to create a whirlpool, gracious and curious. It swirls eddies around her, almost as wide as she is tall, and she sees its tail as an extension of its grace. No danger here – only rounded shapes and plump resolve. The stingray is creating something for her. Gwen feels courage surge in her chest, purposeful and global. She is becoming. 

 

The blotches on the stingray's back begin to move and whisper to each other. Gwen leans in, fascinated, as the speckles converge into circles, beckoning her to breathe hard through her snorkel and dive. Vertically, she kicks downward until she is above taeniurops meyeni, seeking her favour. The mottles pulse and spread into loops, like aureolae, expanding into overlapping ripples. Gwen is entranced. The tail extends longer than her arm, but she is unafraid of the barb beneath. Reaching, flat-palmed, then rounded with cupped hand, Gwen touches the stingray's smooth skin, and the dappled markings morph up her fingers and onto her wrist.

 

Her lungs expand.

 

The breath is hers not hers. Hers not hers. Hers not hers. 

 

Hers. Gwen inhales salt and the daubed mottling respires up her arm, to her neck, onto her back, down the nape of her knees. She is pliant, like the water, and pushes deeper to follow, her skin darkening. The snorkel, discarded, is detritus on the seabed.

 

Around her, above the water, there is muted screaming, as Gwen strips synthetic leggings and rashie from her lithe frame. Breastless, no matter. Her chest is even and pale, the colour of aquatic sisterhood. A hand from the surface flails at her ankle, trying to catch her but Gwen is already undulating. 

 

With a riffle of tails and curls corrugating their pectoral fins, two blotched fantail stingrays lilt and waft on the current, over the anemone garden and through the crags, into the circular silence. 

 

Bio: Kathy Shortland-Jones is a writer, teacher and mother living on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean Territories. She writes short stories, creative non-fiction and poetry. Kathy's poetry won the Red Room Poetry Forest competition in 2022, was longlisted in the 2025 Ros Spencer Poetry Competition and was Highly Commended in the Poetry Object competition in 2019. Her poetry has been published in Creatrix 70 (2025), Meuse (2025) Brushstrokes Anthology (2025), Big Screens Project for the 2025 Perth Poetry Festival and the Grieve Anthology (2023). Her prose has been Highly Commended in the Peter Cowan short-story competition (2019) and the KSP Little Black Dress ‘Spooky Stories' competition (2021). She is currently studying a Masters in Creative Writing through Edith Cowan University.