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Me, I was always keen on the towels, the towels so large they could wrap entirely around my body and still make a hood over my head, me sitting there on the end of the dock, my legs still kicking in the water after swimming. My father always dried me off, him with his large hands, he always dried me off while I still sat there kicking in the water, and he, my father, only needed one hand to dry my head.
When I was finished playing, he would carry me up the needle sprinkled steps to the cabin so that I
didn't need to wash my feet off in the bucket of murky ragwater by the door. While he carried me, I pinched at the tightness lumping in his arm, wondering how long he could carry me before the tendons snapped and rolled his muscle up like a window shade, and I had always figured he could carry me to anyplace I asked him.
Then me, I would fall asleep on the big couch, the couch by the fireplace, still wrapped in my towel, pretending to be the sole survivor of a shipwreck, recovering by the fire, when in fact it is the sun I can feel, the sun that warms the little curl of my body. And as I look out past my father, the kind fisher who rescued me from the rocks, I can see the tree stumps, balanced with seagulls, sticking up from the water, which are actually fragments of the shattered hull of my ship, I can hear the yawning of the sea, telling me that all voyages end the same.
So me, I turn away from the water, I turn to the kind fisher, my father, him, and even though I visited him in the nursing home last week, recalling the color of his eyes is like trying to read the writing on a flashlight.
END
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