Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  Everything beneath the ice has drained away, everything that was not solid. Where the cattails stop, so does that unlikely architecture; here is the edge of the frozen sheet, clean and deliberate as a cross-section, the fogged blue of sea glass. We can see where the cattails pass through the ice, spearing it, reaching on into the January sky and holding the pond surface up there triumphantly, three feet above the ground. Beyond the cattails, the surface lies in hard white pieces in the empty bed, shattered like an opaque mirror.

  The babies want to crawl in under there and play, but we don’t let them. A few broken stalks and the ice ceiling might collapse and crush them. But we understand the impulse. They have only recently learned to walk, to fling themselves clumsily between what they have and what they want. You and I have been upright for decades (not having gained much grace for all that) and still we’d like to walk out onto it, onto the lofted ice, to see if this implausibility can hold our weight. But we are superstitious. Because even though we can envisage the chain of events that might cause such a thing to happen—a blocked drain, a snap freeze, an unblocked drain, the surprising but not impossible strength of cattails—it is still magic. It is magic in the sense that there is no metaphor you can build out of it that will not undermine its magic. We stand at the roadside looking out at it for ten or fifteen minutes, holding tight to our daughters, who flap belligerently at the ends of our fingers like poorly trained kestrels. Then we get back into the car and drive to your sister’s house, where the salmon is overdone and nothing extraordinary happens. Where we try with our rickety metaphors, and cannot even get them to judder across the table. We watch them fall over between the salt shaker and the cruet stand. Your sister grows tired of humoring us and begins clearing the dinner plates with their neat little piles of translucent bones.

  What passes for fun with you two, she says. Christ Almighty.

  While your sister is in the kitchen I swipe through the photographs, and find every one of them wanting, paling in comparison to the remembered pond. I hold the phone up for you to look.

  This isn’t quite it, is it?

  No, you say, leaning across the table. That just looks like an ordinary frozen pond.

  Several hours and many miles before the uplifted pond, I had prayed in a vague and wordless sort of way to whatever nameless thing we entreat when we do not believe in God. It’s hypocritical, you’ve told me this. To still want signs. To scratch for evidence of predestination—something bigger than ourselves with its chin above our heads, its paws upon our shoulders. Something to tell us, Yes, go on, this is the way to go.

  But at your sister’s table we are still working with what we have. What we have is whatever hasn’t drained away. I say this aloud. I am that dumb. I wind it up and I let it go, watch it teeter then topple over (salt shaker, cruet stand) before it gets to you. Sitting right there across from me, still hopeful. Still waiting for something you can trust your weight on.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to everyone at Catapult for spending another book with me. To the (probably) supernatural Jonathan Lee, Alicia Kroell, and the fabulous Wah-Ming Chang.

  Thank you, Nicole Caputo and Jenny Carrow, for capturing the collective aura of these stories.

  To Claudia Ballard, my ongoing gratitude for your faith. Thank you, Jessie Chasan-Taber.

  Thank you to all at Black Inc. in Australia, especially to Julia Carlomagno and Chris Feik for their care and close attention, and to Marian Blythe for the moxie.

  Thank you, Aviva Tuffield, for urging this collection into being, and for your encouragement over the years.

  Thank you to the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford, and to the Fiction Fellows of 2014, 2015, and 2016.

  Thank you, Carmel and Ted Pittman, for sharing extraordinary places; Vanessa and Neil Boyack (sorry about the piano); Lisa Lang and Gerard Butera for milk bar nights. Thank you, Michelle de Kretser and Chris Andrews, for kindness, guidance, and vitamin C.

  Thanks to Louise Glück, for the August sun.

  Thank you, Yoann Gentric and Billy Exton, for the spider on the ceiling and French repairs. Thanks to Alice Bishop, Garnette Cadogan, and Wayne Macauley.

  Thank you, Maxine Beneba Clarke. Thank you, Jennifer Mills. Thank you, Mireille Juchau.

  Thank you, Derek Shapton, for not demanding a smile.

  To Angela Meyer, for being a friend and a force.

  To Patrick Pittman, for being a cardinal point through all these years, all these stories and the places they drew from.

  To Jonny Diamond, for reaching across so much distance, again and again.

  Several of the stories in this collection have appeared, in earlier versions, in the following publications: “Sinkers” in The Monthly, “Horse Latitudes” as “What Falls Away” in Review of Australian Fiction, “A Small Cleared Space” in Overland, “What Passes For Fun” in The Canary Press and The Scofield, “Glisk” in Australian Book Review (as the winner of the 2016 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize), “Post-Structuralism for Beginners” in Overland, and “Anything Remarkable” in Australian Book Review.

  I remain deeply grateful for the time, focus, and cultural exchange fostered by several organizations during the writing of this book: the BR Whiting Studio in Rome; the Yaddo Artists’ Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York; and The Hermitage in Sarasota, Florida.

  Thank you to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for their generous support.