A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

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THE YEARS, SHE SAW, fell heavily as books: the missing husband pinging a racket against the chuff of his hand, her charmed sister at the rental’s beach, the raging Jean herself. In a coil of towel, the little boy named Jack was powdered free of sand. She tended to him then — absent, curious, easeful — and he calmed under the warmth of her hand. Now Jack’s body was his own and not a thing she felt branched of, her hands growing out of; mother and son, they had even smelled the same once, when Jack’s teeth were growing in. Now she did not get close enough — did not want to get close enough — to smell him. Jack’s skin was given over to the wild fluctuations of his age, which meant it was one day clear and smooth, and the next erupted, and still later newly healed and probably sore. Now the boy smoked.

It was what he asked for first with the smoke of something smoked down clouding around his head: “Did you remember cigarettes?” Yes, yes, her soft assent. “But what I need,” Jack said, “are socks.” Snack foods, paper, stamps: the listlessly articulated list from every visit grew as the corridors grew, or so it seemed to Jean as she walked through the swabbed facility with its smell of Lysol and fish!

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