Elise Hempel

His car rolls up to the curb, you switch your mood, which doll to bring and rush out again on the sliding steps of your shoes half-on, forgetting to zip your new pink coat in thirty degrees, teeth and hair not brushed, already passing the birch, mid-way between us, too far to hear my fading voice calling my rope of reminders as I lean out in my robe, another Saturday morning you’re pulled toward his smile, his gifts, sweeping on two flattened rafts from mine to his, your fleeting wave down the rapids of the drive.

After my father unhooded it, lugged it down the steep path to the boat and clamped it on, drew back the cord again and again like a pitch about to be thrown, grimacing with each whining refusal, and muttered, finally said She doesn't want to start, after it always did, and we shoved away from the pier, rowed out of the dense tangle of weeds and lily pads, not once did our resting oars uncross their feet, not even as we entered the shallow inlet between our lake and the next, just purring through the reeds in that narrow passage, over the billow of silt, the rocks, never getting stuck before we flew through the waves, his hand guiding the tiller.

Atop his exhausted buggy with its rusted wheels and now-stuck key, one boot missing, a faded jersey, the bill of his cap cracked off, he sits behind a nicked brown horse that once flicked its tail, clattered around planked floor or rug when the buggy was wound after school by children who've since fallen behind him, white-haired or gone, as he still waves the flopping spring of his crop, still stares through dimming goggles, gathering gray ribbons of dust in his silent, frozen race down an ever-unfurling track, hunched to win, leaving far back all claps and laughter, his once-smooth face scarred and pitted, just the white fleck of a smile now, more a sneer, his empty fists on the reins of air still holding tight.