Free Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo by Boris Fishman

impenetrable, but away from the light it picked up a blue hem that softened the darkness. Maya stared at the crumpled butt in her hand, which sent up a distressed odor. On the other side of the roadway was an embankment that rose several feet above human height. It tilted at an angle that made it seem climbable; several cotoneasters spotted the bank. The roadway was freshly paved; Alex would have been pleased; Maya could not recall one vehicle passing in the time she and Frank had stood smoking, though, surely, some had. It wasn’t the swallowing darkness she feared, but her own unreliability; her attention was off.
    Maya felt Frank at her shoulder. “I am not sure do you want solitude or company,” he said watchfully.
    She conjured a weak smile that she hoped showed her gratitude. “I’m just killing time till—” He pointed at the bus. She nodded. She was standing farther from home than she had traveled in years, talking openly with a man she hadn’t known two hours before. The order of things was like the thin spots of ice on a wintertime lake. You stepped badly and the cold gleam was around your ankles. This was what Raisa was trying to ward off. Usually, Maya waited outRaisa’s admonitions: superstitions and prejudice. But it occurred to her now that the woman had lived a life, too—had not always been a round ball at the feet of her husband and son.
    â€œWhen Max was tiny,” she said to Frank, “he disliked even to be taken out of the house. When the stroller appeared, he would bawl. My father-in-law said you have to break boys—the outdoors turns little boys into healthy adults. He decorates an office chair fifty hours a week, so I guess he would know. They were sitting out on the deck one time—Max was already a walker, my father-in-law was reading the newspaper—and a swarm of hornets came down over his head. I started screaming and ran for him—and was bitten. My father-in-law reached for him—and was bitten. But Max was not bitten.
    â€œThere were other times—we had to put a kind of harness around him so he wouldn’t swim out too far in the lake. And every time, you ask yourself: Is that him being a child, or is that him being my child? And all the months that have gone by without you remembering, the count goes back to zero.”
    â€œI don’t understand fully,” Frank said apologetically.
    â€œMax is adopted,” she said, not looking at him.
    â€œOh,” Frank bounced his head.
    â€œNo one knows,” she said. “Not even Max. And I just said it to you.”
    â€œOh,” Frank said in a different way. “You ask yourself the same questions when you’re biological,” he said, wanting to help her.
    â€œYes, but you can answer them,” she said.
    â€œI guess so,” he said. They stared at the darkened roadway and the bank beyond. “He’ll turn up,” Frank said with the resentment of someone forced into platitudes.
    Maya felt a pain climb up her right arm and go off between her shoulder and collarbone. She was grateful for the sensation—her body at its own work, beyond hers. She wanted to use it. She dropped the butt into the trash can and set off across the roadway. A feeble call rose from Frank. She ignored it.
    â€œHey!” Frank called out. “Lady. I don’t know your name!”
    Her nails sank into the dried soil of the bank like a hide. She wanted something, anything, to occupy her hands, which for six hours had flitted between her mouth, her temples, her chest, as if she were restraining organs that wanted to leap out. Up above the lip of the bank, she imagined that her son awaited her in the shallows of some lake like the frog Frank watched on holiday trips. On her touch, the frog would transform into her son, as in the fairy tale. Her son turned into a frog when he left her, and now she would rescue him.
    Frank cursed, chucked his cigarette, and set