Florida(64)

He puts the paper in her hand, squeezes it, and is gone.

It is a poem, in rhyme. It is about the mother.

She doesn’t read more than the first stanza, though she can’t bring herself to throw out the poem.

She starts laughing and can’t stop, even when her stomach hurts, even when her sight goes glossy. Another fucking writer; just what the world needs.



* * *



—

And this moment will be the one to stay with her forever: She’s crouching beside her smallest son in the exposed seabed. The tide pool a miniature ocean. A snail retreats his horns when they tickle him with a feather, a red anemone pulses as the tide pulls the water away, algae with green hairs feel like satin on their fingertips. The little boy is still, sun on his brown body. The older boy is picking across the rocks, toward the cliffs. He is the size of her palm. Soon she’ll call him back. Not yet.

The little one and she watch ghostly things with silver backbones nibbling at their ankles. Shrimp or fish, she doesn’t know. She knows so little about this astonishing world.

If a meteor crashed down right now, would we die? the little boy says.

Depends on the meteor, I guess, she says.

Huge.

Then probably, she says very slowly.

He sucks his lips in. Like the dinosaurs, he says.

The truth might be moral, but it isn’t always right. She says, Well. The plus side is that we’d never know about it. One minute, we’re in the sun, enjoying the ocean and ice cream and naps and love. The next, nothing.

Or heaven, he says.

Okay, she says sadly.

The older boy is now the size of a thumb. He has gone too far for her to save him in a calamity. Rogue wave, kidnapper. But the mother doesn’t call for him. There is something so resolute in the set of his shoulders. He isn’t going anywhere, just away. She understands.

When she looks back at her younger son, he is holding a rock over his head. He is aiming at the snail. Boom, he whispers, but he keeps his arm in the air. And he holds his fingers closed.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Thank you: Florida, sunniest and strangest of states; Bill Clegg and Marion Duvert; Sarah McGrath, Jynne Dilling Martin, Danya Kukafka, Geoff Kloske, Anna Jardine, and the rest of the shining lights at Riverhead; Kevin A. González, Elliott Holt, Ashley Warlick, and Laura van den Berg; the editors of the journals and anthologies where these stories first appeared; the MacDowell Colony for the gift of time; Ragdale and Olivia Varones; my parents and parents-in‐law; and the nannies and teachers and copy editors and good dogs and friends and readers of the world.

Thank you, Clay and Beckett. Extra thanks to Heath, my Florida baby, whose book this is.