the madison review
loll over on the ocean bottom, eaten or disintegrating in the salt water, disintegrating like the child in her face, or eventually her memory of childhood, or the way that her face in the year that had passed since you’d seen her must have certainly changed on its way to actual disintegration, the way your own had certainly changed on its way, the way your mother’s changed when she looked out the backdoor screen, and asked, “Why won’t your brother visit?” and your father, who looked just like him, saying, “He’s a grown man,” and that day you’d left the park and gone back to your apartment and didn’t think at all, but heard in your head the words, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.” And now you’re saying to the boy, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.” He looks at you very seriously. “If it don’t matter, why d’you keep saying it?” “To remind myself.” “Okay. Then why you crying then?” “I’m not crying. “ “You are crying. There’s tears on your face.” And the boy lifts his finger to your cheek and wipes it and shows the water on your finger. He looks at it himself. ‘I’m getting you outta there,” he says. • You did not need the station at the end of the long train ride home to serve as a symbol of things coming to an end. She had been distantly friendly as you’d traveled back, commenting on things she’d seen out the window, taking your hand once as you’d crossed over a river, but then inexplicably letting it go once you’d crossed, and when you neared the city, you’d opened your eyes to find her looking at you, her head turned slightly sideways, and she looked even younger than she was, in the way that the late afternoon sun sliced through the windows and shone on her face, the way it seemed to you that light was drawn to a place on the faces of the young, somewhere over the brows and nose and cheeks, and radiated outward, and how that dissipated as people grew older, as if light were a lover losing interest, because, after all, she was a lover losing interest. She asked, out of the blue, “Have you been with many women before me?” “Why are 16