by Fran Blake

High grasses (we set them afire each October and watch small pieces of orange break off and fly through the air until they are black and drop to the earth in our garden) and punk weed bunches around the bay, boats rocking, waters overrun their boundaries, ocean meets inlet. The streets flood. We stand knee high dragging the water, making paths with our feet. The corners of books have turned brown and wrinkled dyed by water and salt; the clothing hangs on lines, flat and shapeless without bodies inside, occasionally blown into shape by the wind. Clothespins fall like pellets of rain. A group of boys all in brown cotton shorts and brown woven caps drop into the flooded streets with inner tubes. They float in the floods with the hundreds of fish who have been deposited to this unknown place as if one body of water is as good as another. Light slips through the edge of the clouds. Beach sand is left in piles where the ocean has receded. By August, the grasses are no longer green. The fields look dry like Mrs. McCarthy’s hair. Sometimes, I see blue flies nesting in her hair. Once a black and white warbler pulled on a strand and Mrs. McCarthy yelled. “What do you think? Does my head look like a pile of straw?” I don’t want to be rude, so I stay quiet, but inside I say, “Yes, Mrs. McCarthy, exactly.” The end of August is a sad time though because not only is Mrs. McCarthy looking like a pile of straw; it looks that way everywhere there was green. Without the purple flower of the butterfly bushes, there are no butterflies, no pieces of colored glass filling the sky as if the orange roses and daffodils have lost their place just as the ocean has.

The seagulls are still hovering in the sky. They land in our garden, their beaks hold fishes with scales so silver, they look like tin foil but despite their beauty grandmother exclaims if I were a hunter, I’d shoot those flying white boulders. Grandma and I go through the garden, I on my knees, picking up the fishes’ bones and piecing them together trying to construct my own skeletal fish like the dinosaurs I have seen in The Museum of Natural History. Secretly, I carry the bones into my room until grandmother begins to sniff, wiggling her nose, every time she comes near my door. I experiment with deception: if I keep my windows open, the lilacs and lavender might disguise the fish bone collection. 

I save sea-things, razor shells, cowrie spirals, moon shells, keyhole limpets, wentle whorls, helmet shells, periwinkles. My father seems disturbed by the hole in the woven tray that holds his breakfast. He puts his finger through the hole and is too distracted to eat. I cover the hole with a sand-colored napkin and this satisfies him. He mentions the keyhole limpets we picked off the beach together when I was small. He says we used baskets like the tray his food is in.

 “Would you like me to take the food out of the tray?”

 “Yes,” he says. “It still smells of fish.”

 “Fish bones,” I say laughing. “Grandma would sniff for them.” 

“Yes,” Dad says, “Grandma knew.” He laughs. “Maybe you better keep the fish tray to make sure you’ll be okay? I’ll be gone soon,” he raises both arms as if he is lifting himself, getting perched to fly. “You know,” he says. “I wish I could still take care of things.” 

We hold hands and he says, “Gentle,” and I see his hand is black and blue from the repeated stabs of syringes drawing blood. He says my name. He says the names of all his children like a roster of attendance. For a moment, he looks away. He thinks that I am the pile of blue blankets on a chair on the other side of the room. 

“I’m right beside you,” I say. 

“Is it possible for you to be two places at once?” he asks. “Sometimes I feel as if I am. I can feel myself leaving but I’m still able to come back.”  

 I ask Dad if he remembers the boys who floated inner tubes in the flood? He smiles. “You asked me why didn’t they swim in the ocean.”

“And why was it?” 

“I still don’t know,” says Dad.

 “I wish they didn’t take my red shoes,” I say. 

“Your mother said some little girl needed those shoes more than you did.” I shake my head. I remember.

“They didn’t just steal my red shoes. All those clothes that had been drying in the sun after the rain: my red and black plaid dress with a white lace collar and a silver pin with strawberries, my yellow waxed cotton raincoat with gold clasps like a bracelet and the hat that matched and my favorite red bathing suit with thin white stripes like the candy canes given to me each Christmas by Mr. Walsh.”

My father squeezes my hand. “I know, baby, but in the end, there’s nothing left anyway.”