photo credit: Gale Zucker
Ice cream for lunch at the camp store. The bull frogs sound like plucked strings. They will protect me. I write the last two chapters of my characters' lives, wondering how we came this far. I look exactly like I used to: brown waves, blonde at the face. I eat the grapes my mother packed for my trip home. I would never think to buy such things as grapes, sour red worlds. Potato slices in bags. Whenever I visit, they try to give me everything: groceries, money, sunglasses, cloth.
But I don't really need everything. Just one thing.
Just one thing a day can keep you going, I tried to tell my friend the other night. A poem, a bird. Corn. You have to look for it.
Like the lake. Coming out of the trees, it was green, green like a green-eyed boy, green like a leaf machine. But the water was clear, not clotted. We sat on a tree's roots that jutted out of the ground, and watched a child swim. I hope I don't have to jump in there and save him, he said to me. Why do you always say that? I asked, thinking of the neighbors' staked dog.
Because it's my lot in life, to save people.
You've never saved me, I said.
You don't need saving.