up outside. Sam and I could take the dogs through the fields, we could breathe in the smell of last summer’s grass melting beneath the snow, warming up in the sunshine, and we could breathe in the smell of a milder wind blowing through the needles of the pines.
Go home with your wife, I say to him, and then he leaves and the smell of the chain saw oil is gone, too. I am glad to be free of the smell. It was the smell of a machine and there is nothing mechanical taking place. What is taking place is as layered as something in nature. I won’t ever be able to figure it out. It is the pond surface rippling, the meandering grooves of bark on a tree, the tall grass and milkweed leaning over in a strong wind looking like the form of a man lying down in it, only there is no man.
Summer
CALL: My wife, in summer. I can hear her voice. She is calling us into the house while the kids and I are by the stream. Sam, in his shorts, stands in the shallow water trying to catch trout in his hands, and laughing because he can’t, because Bruce and Nelly have bounded into the water with him, muddying the water, scaring the trout away, making them dart up under the shadows of the shore. Sarah is low on the bank, peering into the dark places between piles of brush, calling to foxes or voles, any creatures she hopes live inside. Mia rides on my shoulders as we head back to the house and my big hands fit all the way around her thin sun-warmed ankles. “Watch your head,” I say to Mia as we enter the house and Nelly and Bruce, wet from the stream, push their way past us, to be first through the door. Jen serves us casserole made with zucchini fresh from the garden and while we eat I look out at all of them, happy to see their faces, the steam rising off their plates making me want to wave it away, making me want to always be able to see them as clearly as I can.
About the Author
YANNICK MURPHY is the author of the novels
