Coe Review

he said he was going to try recklessness. It seemed to work for Dora, he
said.
We fished for a long time, until it got dark and I got worried about bears
coming out. It was hard to see anything where we were standing, and they
can come up on you all of a sudden on the soft ground.
Lloyd was telling me about his fourteen children. Some of them were
coming back, he said, but some of them might not. That was the way it often
happened when children left Baranof Island. There was so much to see in
the city, so much newness, but then there was the island. It was all they had
ever known.
I wonder what happened to those children.
My new wife doesn't want any. She says they'll ruin her figure. My first
wife and I lost one, but when it came out, it was nothing but blood and bits
of tissue, not entirely unlike a fish after a bear gets through with him, so it
didn't feel like a child at all. Still I sometimes wonder what it would have
been like if it had lived. But I don't talk about it with my new wife. It is not
a story I tell her.
The last thing I remember about Lloyd was him throwing his line out
on the dark water, a crazy look on his face. It was like he was desperate to
fish something out of the water, to collect something back, little by little. He
was quiet, though, and he kept looking into the darkness as if he could see.
I wondered what Lloyd would do now, all alone in that cabin. I worried
about him with the cold, with the bears. He pressed his lips together until
they disappeared.
My new wife is threading a new pair of earrings through her small ears.
I can still smell the sushi coming from her skin, from her naked back in
front of me. I wonder if I'll ever tell her this story. I wonder if I should
ask Dora to join us for drinks so she can tell it herself, and answer all those
questions, about whether she ever misses her children and her homemade
things, and Lloyd, and how it feels to be restored.
Gut Bay