The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2022

The Meadow 197 Don’t be a baby. It’s not that deep. That was it exactly, and I could see he felt shamed. And wanting to please me, he stepped once, twice into the water and when he fell, I was sure he would bounce up laughing but he stayed under for too long, only the tiny arms waving just above the waterline like tree limbs in a stiff wind. I felt the panic as the slender form of him slid past me in the current and later I would realize it was just his tiny foot, the last part of him that I grabbed, taking him back from the river’s grasp. I saw the dark line of water and the terror of his eyes just below it and imagined the fear of losing him in the moment before his arms went around my neck. I have never known anyone to hold me that tightly, that way, his breath like an engine and ribbons of wet grass stuck to his face as if the river had marked him. Then we were on the riverbank in the broken shade of the trees and California was still far away on the other side of the river, and on that morning we were many days from losing each other. A finger of sun is now at the cantina window, pointing toward the old photograph. Marina shudders at the strangeness of straddling time. Love doesn’t die slowly, she thinks. It doesn’t die at all. “You should have said that to him.” The old man’s answer is like the murmur in a dream. Yes, you’re right, I should have. Maybe in those years when he wrote me long letters. Handwritten letters, paragraph flowing from paragraph like his life was a long novel, as though he had an abundance of time. Beautiful in a way, his long, looping script bent forward like an old man walking, letters completely given over to college mishaps, or the short flirtation with the priesthood, or those months in a county jail in Colorado that he made sound harmless, even entertaining somehow, as though he and the other inmates were actors in a television sitcom. And the times he was sent to Sandwood, the florid descriptions of his therapists there, comical in his telling, that unintentionally read like Kafka. All his letters full of disoriented wisdom, full of details

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