Floating Houses

The night mist leaves us yearning for a new location to things impossibly stationary, the way they’d once float houses made from dismantled ships, brass and timber, from Plymouth, Massachusetts, across the sound to White Horse Beach. You were only a boy. Years later, gazing out to the red buoys of the harbor, you sought those houses, each the location of your childhood’s end. Jon, I make this all sound too complex. Our view of time is stationary, a long prediction of remorse. We’re drinking in timber, camping above Tucson, Arizona. Below, the houses are vague points of light, describing a grief you’ve housed since watching those buildings careen on water, a boy too sullen for your father. So the aspens creak like timber in an aging sloop. The others sleep. You locate the figure of your son, small and stationary, but tell me he’ll die young, body unsound, a childhood diabetic. The bourbon makes you sound entranced—to think one day you’ll return to the house to find that you’ve outlived him, maybe the radio station playing some popular song. Outliving the boy, you’ll outlive yourself. Drunk, we’ve lost our location. I shine my flashlight to find the others. The timbre of your voice grows slack. Leaves and timber rustle in the promise of rain, in the sound of distant thunder that, like death, has no location. Below, relentless clouds will cover houses. The campfire sputters, then grows, buoyed by wind, our bodies the only things stationary. Because of death, our small, unstationary lives become narration—a child is lost in timber in a fable when night approaches. The boy can’t even see his hands. Only owl-cry, the sound of his heart. But soon the aspens part, the houses of his village appear, their location precise and consoling. He’s stationary, not a sound from below. Beyond the timber, floating houses. And there his papa’s lantern, a light the boy can locate.