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The sign on The Damn read 3,000 as the city held back water to run it at full flow for the festival and the Silver Salmon stayed stuck at the bottom unable to spawn packing the water so tight that Yoofie would hit them with each stroke and they would peer up at her as if to ask directions to a less congested waterway. Pison sat in the front of the canoe with his back to Yoofie and for a while they just flowed down the stream and Pison counted the herons waiting along the riverbed. He has come with me. He has taken the bait. He will learn from me. Yoofie kept her eyes looking down the river out to the delta. She felt the wind pick up and grab her hat from her head and she had felt that gust she had known that breeze and the pressure built upon her forehead enough to push the purple rain hat into the air and into the water where it would flow downstream and never come back. Because she wouldn’t be coming back.
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She saw the movement of hands into the emptiness of the glass and became the water running from her faucet creating suds upon the dishware. She saw the white framing of the quartered window in focus as Alex and Turner played with the swing and she heard the clamor of stools on the ground atop an adhesive floor with three days of beer caked to its surface. “I’ll have another.” She tapped on her glass with her middle finger supported at the center knuckle by her pointer finger as if to make a little hammer. The bartender put down the glass and walked back over with a pint of whatever it was ordered before. “What’s you name sweetie?” The bartender swirled the glass in her hand and the framing came back into picture. “I’m Alex.” She lied. “Yours?” She didn’t care about the response but knew that if she had just a bit of conversation today she could cross it off her mental checklist that night. Yes. Yes I did try to make a friend. Yes I did learn someone’s name. In this thought she had lost her attention to the bartender, “Did you see the welding shop burned down?” She repeated, “Took half the block with it. I loved that old building, did you?”
“I hadn’t seen it but I’m sorry it didn’t do much for me just seemed like another workshop this town is full of them.” She twirled the glass around and took a large sip. “Also, I forgot your name.” The bartender didn’t take kindly to this and walked away without saying another word. The truth was that Yoofie loved that old welding shop. Before the canoe she would walk through the industrial district and stare at the old metal buildings patched together with shipping containers and filled with craftsman working on their projects. The old welding shop was precariously built of wood and filled with tanks of explosive gas, so any misuse of the tools inside could result in the entire block being burnt to a crisp. Yoofie knew this because she had a friend that used to yell at her when she would try to pick off the warning labels on the outside. She missed that friend, but still had a craving to pick at the labels.
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The water was cold and hard against the paddle racing in beads down the grain of the oak and back into the river. The moon cut through the branches of the trees serrated from the drooping needles of the cedar mounted on the riverbanks. Do you see it? His gaze turned off the bow of the canoe and it was red red red varnished by the lapping of the rapids. Do not look past it. His hand blistered from the skin the skin being too thin too thin and rubbing against metacarpals.
The canoe would fall on its hull and fill half was full of the cold hard water burning his shin and keeping his socks wet wet wet squishing like the pillow beneath his knees to keep the blood flowing and he flowed down the river. Why do you run when we leave the door open for you why do you just do without asking why do you linger in the hallway if she’s there with her books drinking coffee why do you protect the dishes why do you. Driftwood clumps became a drum against the fibers of the canoe and he paddles alongside them barely grazing the surface twisting the paddle at an angle that slid through the water instead of pulling it. I can see the monolith. And the shore became a stage lighted by a beam filled with fog directed on a pillar of limestone. He could not control the boat but he had seen the piles of sticks the piles of plastic the piles of messages written in the gravel of the beach and he had skipped those rocks enough to know the water would become calm about four hops into the river and he had been there and swam.
As the boat followed his path the water began to light up and show him the fish and he had seen those fish and he had seen her and he saw her smacking a knife against a black stone and he called out against the canoe grinding on the gravel of the riverbed, “Did you see me and just want to make me suffer of do I really gasp that quiet?”
She continued smacking, “I saw you a while back and wanted a fire to dry your socks but the ground is too wet.” And she looked tired and her glasses were crooked and the razors of the moon became her eyes. It is like he has seen me it is like I am seen it is like I told him. And before he could disembark she had stood and placed her hand on the bow pulling the canoe up up up the beach until it was all dry and he sat there shaking and thin cold from his socks and she looked him up and down a few times before asking, “Why do some animals leave themselves out for the buzzards after their lover dies?”
