Lisa C. Krueger

He clings to her while other boys play Marco Polo. A year of lessons, this is what she gets? She wants to lie in the sun. Enough, she says, loosens her arms, releases him. The boy winces at light bouncing off water. He grasps at her, where he thinks she is, but feels blind. He decides to drown for his mother. Just this morning he breathed only when she breathed, laughed when she laughed. Before he goes under he hears one boy catch another:My eyes were closed! His cries, underwater, make bubbles that rise like loose balloons. He watches his mother’s legs move away. Out of breath, he swims toward empty blue.

Someone decapitated all Birds of Paradise along Ocean Avenue; strollers and shoes trample the discarded beaks. She keeps walking. At noon a hallway speaker booms Code Blue Code Blue one minute before her grandson is born. In the evening, a nurse hands him to her: clean, swaddled, murmuring: the fullness of his being spears her. Why didn’t I pick them up? she wonders, arms tightening around the infant, whispers I still carry you! to her son when he comes to take his child.

When she was ten her father left her at a Denny’s—You’ll get back. She walked the other way for miles before a car pulled over, a man shouted You are lost, opened his door to her. Beyond him was darkness. No lights, no signs, no people telling her what to do: she kept walking. Upright, strident, terrified by her act. Terrified she was bad for saving herself.