Svetlana Sterlin

STAGES OF VELOCITY

I. Latent

I learned to be quiet at a young age. My hidden talent was to stay hidden.

Playing hide-and-seek at gymnastics—it must’ve been school holidays; I can’t imagine why else we were playing a game at training—at the age of six or so: tucked around the corner of the gym by the beams, I crouched behind old pommel horses, wondering why none of the other kids had thought to hide there. A dusty spot, sure—but hidden. Between amputated horse limbs and deconstructed metal rods, I was concealed enough to be overlooked, but not so much that I couldn’t see through the gaps.

I oriented myself by the sound of my breath and the echoes of other groups around the corner. Muffled calls of coaches, my mum’s harsh accent among them. The trampoline creaking under somebody’s weight. The bars squeaking as one of the older girls swung and flew around them. The floor reverberating under a more agile gymnast’s bounces and clean landings. And the urgent footsteps of someone sprinting towards the vault. A pause. And the mat crushed upon landing.

I didn’t feel anticipation at being found. I knew I’d chosen the best spot. And I was right; nobody found me.

I stayed there for at least twenty minutes after the game had finished. Outside, I heard the session resume. Giggling and chatting and chalky hands clapping.

I wasn’t sure whether I should come out or not. Nobody had even noticed that I was gone.

II. Elastic

My mum sat me down on the floor of our kitchen, cold tiles drawing grids along my legs.

‘Stop making all that noise! Ради бога, the neighbours will think I’m trying to kill you.’

I bit my tongue to swallow my voice, to contain it inside. Wouldn’t want to draw the attention of our neighbours, the landlords. We lived in —the much smaller, long neglected—half of a duplex. The walls were very thin.

My mum sat on my back; my nose inched closer to my knees, but not close enough. I resisted, pushed back even though I knew that would make her lean into me harder.

My bones whined: rusty hinges refusing to yield. She grabbed hold of my arms, laying them down along my shins, reaching towards but failing to grasp the ends of my flexed toes.

‘Боже мой—you’re like a piece of wood!’

Her weight lifted and released my back. I breathed again.

For a few minutes I lay there, looking up at the fluorescent light on the ceiling, the bare lightbulb buzzing.

In the bathroom, my mum turned the tap on, probably washing her hands of me.

Somewhere on the other side of the kitchen wall, the neighbours’ chairs scraped across floorboards. Dishes rattled in a sink. A burst of laughter erupted from their family dinner.

III. Slow

I quit gymnastics when I was eight. After that, I didn’t have a lot to do with my mum. We lived in the same house, but we rarely found ourselves under the same roof at the same time.

Not long after that, we moved across the country so Dad could coach at a fancy private school. We still lived in a shitty rental. The walls were still very thin. The warm smell of our neighbours’ curries seeped through the carpets and the walls, as did the sound of the family two houses down, screaming at each other in the night. I wondered if any of the cries came from the boy who lived there, if his mother stretched his limbs to her liking, too—if, perhaps, he was a dancer.

It wasn’t until our final month of living in that house that I discovered the boy was in my class at school. He wasn’t a dancer.

For the five years that we lived in that complex, I walked the same path to the pool every day. I spent more time there than I did at school or at home.

Swimming’s weightless fluidity should’ve been a welcome change from gymnastics, but it wasn’t. I remained inflexible—stubbornly, stiffly latched to old habits.

Every day, I stopped at the same traffic light in front of the school, cars whooshing past when the light was green, screeching to a halt when it was red.

I was mesmerised by the turning spokes of the wheels and how, if I stared long enough, they appeared to spin backwards. When I blinked, it looked for a split second like they’d stopped, like something had caught in there and arrested that whirling momentum.

The intersection was a busy one, in the hub of an affluent area where children were dropped off at their fancy school in Mercs and BMWs. The crossing was an inconvenience to all those important people trying to get to important places and meet other important people. And I held the power to throw a net over them, to catch them like flies in a spiderweb.

IV. Mass

I may have held the power to stop the flow of traffic, but the dial of my own speed was something that remained—like the water—slippery under my fingers. On a daily basis, Dad remonstrated my inability to grasp it.

He chided me until the barrier between our languages dissolved, melded like the film that separated water from air. He chided me for calling him ‘Папа’ at the pool, even if it was in private.

‘Dad’ always felt strange on my tongue—in any setting.

In English, he was my coach. But the longer we lived in this country, the more English encroached on our speech, and the wider the space grew between us and our roots, our first language, and the distinction between dad and coach became fuzzier.

In English, he chastised me for giggling, for being slow, for messing sets up, and occasionally, in private, for being тупой. He found ways to capitalise on these deadweights.

He bought me a dragsuit to teach me the difference between efficiency and futility. He had me swim with a sponge and though he was ruthless about throwing things away, he had me wear old swimmers over my new ones.

Every time I pushed off the wall with these cumbrances, there was a moment of smooth, effortless gliding before the weight yanked me back, demanding me to work harder.

V. Unyielding, Still

When I turned twelve, Dad moved me up to State Squad.

We used the mezzanine for dry land training, the walls of the sports hall echoing our laughter back at us. Humidity drew sweat from our skin, gluing our hair in place after the pool water dripped from our split ends.

After the strength portion of our land sessions, Dad paired us up for flexibility exercises. Whenever we were an odd number, he’d be my partner and use me to demonstrate exercises even though I wasn’t very good at them. Even though I remained inflexible.

He asked me to sit down and touch my toes, but my fingers remained shamefully far from my ankles. His weight loaded onto my back. Gentle at first, unlike my mother. I pushed back in spite of myself.

‘Stop!’ one girl cried. ‘What are you doing?’

I scrunched my eyes up, but a tear managed to squeeze out and splatter onto my thigh nevertheless.

‘She’s clearly in pain!’

‘If you want change, you must apply pressure. You can’t improve in sport without pain.’

I felt Dad’s voice reverberate through his body and along my spine, jangling across my bones up to my straining jaw.

‘Five more seconds.’

My lips were pressed together, boxing in my voice and the sensation of fullness buzzing inside me, the feeling of feeling extended to every nerve and edge of me. The five seconds thinned out to something everlasting.

When Dad rose, I kept my face down, hoping my tears would evaporate. But I could feel everyone looking at me, so I straightened up into the silence, at the intersection of everyone’s pitying gazes.

Dad clapped his hands. ‘Everyone, into pairs now.’

A moment before anyone moved or spoke or even breathed.

I didn’t look at anyone. I just got to my feet and prepared myself for the next exercise. Because if I hadn’t been pushed, I would never have felt anything at all.

VI. Witnessed (by the Mezzanine)

Us, wrapping green surgical tubing around poles. Me, stretching, pulling, willing the cords to spark with tension, willing my wrists to stay rigid like the rest of me. But where I was inflexible, I was also slack like a jellyfish. I couldn’t hold water and I couldn’t keep my muscles from spasming inside me.

On land, I felt anchored, always sinking towards the floor, towards the pool’s edge.

My inability to complete a single chin-up was a source of laughter for my teammates, of heavy-headed shame for my dad. Even with an assistance band, I flailed. Just like the water, the straps slipped out from under my feet, or between my fingers, refusing to connect with my palm.

On the mezzanine, laughter bubbled around me: me, swirling around in it, steeping. As if the sting when the tube slipped from my grasp and whipped my inadequate arms wasn’t punishment enough.

‘Leave.’

I looked up. Dad stood behind me.

‘What?’

‘You’re unfocused. It’s unproductive. Leave, so everyone else can continue training.’

Later, in his office, he told me that I was an embarrassment.

‘You have no idea how hard I work,’ he said, ‘and I’m still not seen as equal. Everyone knows you’re my daughter—your performance reflects directly on me.’

There it was again: that blurring. Which version of him was I speaking to? Which version of me was he addressing? He’d called me his daughter, but in the wrong language.

The next day after training, instead of waiting for him in the office, I began doing additional exercises. And again the next day, and the next, and the next, until the stretch cords found grooves in my palms, until my muscles grew sinewy roots around my bones.

Within a few months, I got up to 400 sit-ups in a row. I told Dad but he didn’t believe me. Even though he always said that who we were was decided behind closed doors, by what we did when nobody could see.

Did it still count if I wanted to tell him, if I announced my new record to the squad the next day? Did it count if nobody saw the evidence of my growth? Only the mezzanine; at night, the floor-to-ceiling windows transformed into dark, gaping eyes overseeing all. Or maybe teeth, filed and gleaming, ready to swallow it—my entire little world—whole.

VII. Psychology (of a Distance Swimmer)

In separate stalls we pinched patches of race suits between our fingers. Kneading our flesh, willing the material to slip over our skins. What was it that saleswoman had said? It’s not about putting the suit on, but about you trying to fit into the suit? Or was it the other way around?

‘Okay, but, like—you’re crazy.’

‘Yeah, who actually chooses to swim an 800?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, heaving a breath and tugging the suit past my hips. I ignored the saleswoman’s advice and jumped up and down, shimmying.

At the age of sixteen, this was my first suit. I’d badgered Dad for years, not understanding that price wasn’t the only obstacle. I suspect his reluctance had more to do with the reason he buckled to English while Mum didn’t. Closer to why I let myself be pulled between two directions, two cultures, two languages, two names, two parents, two states of matter.

I could hear my friends breathing. I hoped I wasn’t being as loud.

‘Where are you two up to?’

‘Just past my hips,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m already up to my boobs.’

‘What boobs?’

‘Shut up.’

I paused. ‘Um, you guys can go if you want. I’ll probably be a few more minutes.’

Quiet.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, totally. See you out there.’

‘Okay.’

Their doors unlatched. Footsteps pattered away. Burst of laughter before they even made it out.

When they were gone, I finished putting my suit on—or fitting myself into it—then beelined to marshalling. Dad and I had already discussed this race. In fact, it was the only thing we could discuss in both our languages.

In the cold room, I tied my hair up, pulled my cap and goggles on, pressed the lenses to my eye sockets, testing the pressure until I was satisfied with the mark they’d leave behind.

Behind the block, I ran my hands over my cap and untwisted my suit straps. My body was moulded into an edgeless lump, a vessel for pounding through something denser than air.

I thought again about why we did it. Why we put ourselves through it, the routine of all that strain, that punishment, just to see how quickly we could travel through space.

It wasn’t enjoyable, but I suppose it was something.

When I finished my 800, I felt the familiar tension accumulate, disperse evenly throughout my body—years of muscle memory thrumming in my skin—followed at the wall by a swift release, a slackening like I was melting into the water around me.

After I’d collected myself, heaved myself out of the pool, I found Dad without needing to scan the crowd for him.

VIII. Flying

The first time I wobbled over the chin-up bar, I felt the fullness replenish inside me, wondering if it was what my friends had felt years earlier.

I imagined a sparkling fluid illuminating my veins, plinking at my collarbones. But it was only in the water that I could relax, only when I wore my race suit (ironically) that I could move without restriction. Instead of hunching over, my body flattened out, and my tongue sat comfortably in my mouth.

I learned buoyancy, found paths in slipstreams—a precursor to my latent open water career.

My friends and I pulled each other along in our drafts, by the loosening of a taut cord, reeled in by a stronger pair of hands looping the spool around their forearms. Dad was usually the tether at the end of my stretch cord.

I swam out as far as it would give before snapping or tugging Dad in. Moments before slackening, tension fizzled up the cord. I held onto it, then used its charge to spring forwards. And then, for a fleeting ten seconds, I was flying.

The tiles slipped by beneath me, my fingers conducting whirlpools, throwing them out behind my hips, the water yielding to my working legs.

The seconds ticked past in double time, not long enough for me to feel any strain.

At the wall, my pulse was steady, my breath regular as I unhooked the cord.

The memory of flying wasn’t firm enough to hold. Without a force to push against, I couldn’t feel anything.

Svetlana Sterlin is based in Brisbane, Australia, where she writes prose, poetry, and screenplays. A swimming coach and former swimmer, she makes most things about swimming, including her online publication, swim meet lit mag. Her poetry manuscript If Movement Were a Language (forthcoming with Vagabond Press) was the recipient of the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award. Her work was also recognised in the 2023 Richell Prize and Queensland Young Writers Award. Find her writing in Westerly, Island, Cordite, Meanjin, the Australian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. More from Svetlana: https://linktr.ee/svetlanasterlin

Svetlana wrote the following about ‘Stages of Velocity’:

Vignettes have always appealed to me on an aesthetic level, but for this story, the form mirrors the fragmented nature of the memories I've drawn on. These slivers also echo my experience of the two sports I participated in growing up: they're all about repetition, but if you take enough steps away, you'll be able to see some progress.