The Impossible Dream

Its shadows reflect the absence of water.

The last time they took it out was…what?

1988.

July.


He’d taken her fishing on her birthday. She had resisted long enough. Grandpa stocked his pond with trout, some carp. One could baptize them, their numbers were so few.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she baited the hook. And still heard the worm scream behind her eyes.

Not much was said.

Your jump shot is coming along.

Jen never passes me the ball.

It will come. Just keep plugging away.

Once, their silk lines tangled like a morning spider web. The accidental contact embarrassed her, and she fiddled with the reel.

Her pretending not to notice the skin cancer on his ear.

His eyes avoiding new breasts, arrived at that year.

Their boat a tiny island. Unshared.

Swollen with the insects’ persistent plea, she almost confessed that she didn’t care about jump shots. Basketball.

Stupid sports.

But no.

They floated in a blue haze, until she snagged a decent trout. He helped her bring it in, anticipation stretching the old rope of his muscles.

But that surprised mouth, and dumb stare. Instinct unleashed a squeal, as she tossed the slippery thing into the air.

The splash of adrenaline hooking her giddy side. The imagination.

Look at the little sucker go! Let’s call him Don Quixote, Grandpa—

But his gaze sagged to the empty cooler by his feet.

Dragging the boat onto land, and flipping it over, she understood the outing to be a failure. She had hurt him, because of herself.

He climbed the hill with some effort. With her tennis shoes squelched in the muddy bank, she watched him go.

Tears leaked from her eyes.

She called them allergies. All that white pine.



There is a distance that’s longer than years.

But she climbs into the two-seater, anyway.

The fish are still there.

The Darkness of One

She curled herself into a knuckle on the closet floor. Biting her lip, she tried on an amateur pain, wanting it to push everything away.

Not fair.

She punched the belly she had once caressed. Harder. Three days after, and its slackness slaughtered her.

We made it to sixteen weeks. Not. Fucking. Fair.

She touched a finger to her lip, and shuddered at the blood.

Twenty-two cycles of misses. Three in-vitros. One near divorce, as the obsession rode her. Thousands of tears cried, including dozens on the day the test came back positive, hundreds on the morning they first saw the fluttering heartbeat on the ultrasound. But now she couldn’t cry. Like everything else, her ducts were empty.

I did everything right. Didn’t I do everything goddamn right?

This nursery. Painted blue and yellow, with Martin’s cock-eyed giraffes, the week before . . .

The paint fumes, maybe?

The new carpet smelled funny, too. She sank her nose into the fibers, inhaling its chemicals until she felt queasy.

Phantom nausea.

For her ghost baby.

Matthew Jeffrey . . .

Matthew was their compromise. Jeffrey was to honor her father, who had died when she was ten. They had joked about calling him MJ, since Martin had grown up in Chicago, watching the Bulls’ #23 dominate the NBA, and his small world. Martin thought it was a sign that he was due on the twenty-third of February.

“I’m just sayin’, Lila. He’s destined for great things.”

“And I’m just saying that I’ll be happy if he has ten fingers and toes. We can work on his jump shot later. Or never. Maybe he’ll be the artistic type . . . like his dad,” she had teased, as he wrapped his paint-splattered arms around the slight bulge they had taken to calling Homer.

She got on her knees and, with her teeth, tore tags off the onesies and tiny pants and sweaters hanging from the closet rack, spitting them out on the immaculate carpet.

“Honey?” Martin’s voice searched from the hallway.

She blanched at its invasion.

For she had lost him, too. The only number she understood now was alone.

With her toes, she gently slid the door closed, so that even the light could not find her. So that she could lick her dark, wet wound.