Free Last Things by Jenny Offill

couldn’t see us in the dark. Alec ran down the driveway and into the house, slamming the door behind him. “There you are,” my mother said. She sat on the back steps and waited for me. There was a glass in her hand that glinted in the light. “Guess what I am?” I asked, hopping toward her, and she guessed a flamingo, because she always guessed right.
    The next morning, my aunt and uncle got up very early and packed the car. Alec convinced them to let him stay one more day. “I don’t mind driving him back,” my mother said. “There’s an old war monument along the route. Also the Museum of Cranberries.” She offered to take everyone on a tour of historical Windler, but Aunt Fe insisted they’d already overstayed.
    After Alec’s parents left, my mother drove us to the lake. It was an overcast day and hardly anyone was there. As soon as we got to the beach, my mother wandered off to look at birds. Alec and I played a game he had invented the summer before. The gamewas called New Worlds and it began with us standing apart from each other on distant rocks. Each time we played, it was exactly the same. Alec was the explorer and I was the native girl. The object was for him to reach the rock I was standing on before I finished counting to ten. If I reached ten before he got there, I could capture him and cook him in my cannibal pot.
    I closed my eyes and began to count. On eight, I heard him reach my rock.
    “I’ve conquered your country!” he yelled the moment his foot touched down. He whipped off his shirt and waved it like a flag. I had to give him my charm bracelet and my ring and all the money I had. “Prepare to be civilized,” he said.
    Alec leapt across the water to the highest rock of all, then stood there for a long time surveying his land. The sun was setting. “Canada’s on fire,” he said, shading his eyes.
    “Give me back my bracelet.”
    “What’s that? I can’t understand your language.” Alec laughed and dangled my bracelet above the water. His hands looked black against the sky.
    I picked my way across the rocks toward him. He didn’t move until I got within arm’s reach. Then he sidestepped me by jumping onto the next rock. He did this every time I got close enough to catch him. Finally, I lunged at him and caught his sleeve. He tried to twist away, but his foot slipped and he fell in.
    I watched him go underwater, thinking it was one of his tricks. The day before, he’d told me how the great Houdini had been shackled in chains and tossedin the sea. No one believed he’d escape, but of course he did.
    I waited for a long time, but Alec didn’t appear. I ran to the shore and found my mother. When I told her what had happened, she dove into the lake with her binoculars still around her neck.
    Alec wasn’t breathing when she pulled him from the water. She pumped his chest until water came out of his mouth and at last he sputtered out a breath. His hands were clenched into fists, but when he opened them my bracelet wasn’t there. My mother wrapped Alec in a towel and carried him to the car. He told her that he’d been trying to reach a bottle floating near the pier. Once my mother had told us a story about a woman who grew so small she could be fitted inside a bottle and sent to sea. Because of this, Alec and I sometimes walked along the shore, looking for bottles floating in on waves.
    My mother said that before Alec drowned he was slow, but after he came back he was quick. It was as if her dead father’s spirit had touched him in those moments he was gone. Her father could speak twelve languages and curse in more. “He’s the one that looked after you, Alec,” my mother said.
    That night, after dinner, my father sat in his red chair smoking a pipe. Alec jumped up on the footrest and pretended it was a rock. I made a sound like the wind. Alec toppled to the floor. For a moment he was a swimmer and then he was still. I rushed to him and breathed into his mouth. I pumped his