Free Riverine by Angela Palm Page B

each other, silently. A preview of the decades we would spend in and out of touch, but always united, always bonded to one another. In my mind, or outside it if I really had projected, we reached the water’s edge and jumped, arms stretched out wide and mouths gaping. When the water hit my face, I was alone again. I was floating in it. It was water, then it was air, then it was time and space together, then it was gone. I looked down and saw myself on the floor in the pink slip. Wake up , I whispered.

PART II

FIELDS

BIFURCATION
    T here was one last game of corn tag the summer that we moved—before everyone made their exits from the river. Corey had recently gotten out of the boys’ school for delinquent youth, and he was living it up while he looked for a job. Six of us ran through the field beyond the old riverbed. Even in the dark, we knew when to hop over a hole, when to duck to avoid being decapitated by barbed wire. We knew where the bridges built by the generation of kids before us were still intact and could be used to traverse the creek, a trickle of leftover water from the river that had been rerouted a hundred years earlier. We knew the land as we knew our teenaged bodies. Ripe, firm. Yielding in places. In those days, running was nothing but an extension of self. Like breathing. There was no labor in it, only direction and the feeling of blood rushing in our veins. Above us, a silver moon hung sideways from black sky. Soon, the world would swing sideways with it, unhinged, split wide and dripping.
    From somewhere in the corn, Corey tagged my face, blinding me with his flashlight. “Gotcha.”
    “Where are you?” I squinted against white light. His voice came from all directions, his body near. The absence and presence of him at once disoriented me.
    “Guess.” I saw him in my mind as an amalgamation—the boy I’d whispered to at night, whose bedroom window faced mine for years, and the man who was so now at nineteen by law, by stature, and by a growing rap sheet. His voice was more familiar to me than his flesh, the nights we talked on our walkie-talkies outnumbering the number of times we had touched in the past year. He’d been gone for a few months, with weekend visits home. Though he was hardly around anymore, he would still come back to me when he could and we would play like kids, even though we weren’t. At fifteen, I wanted to tip that balance in favor of flesh. I reached out for him with both arms, ready to grab either version, boy or man, but grasped nothing.
    Corn rustled around us. The sound, when you stand inside it, is like water, the dry husks loud as tides. Feet darted from the light in staccato beats. Corey’s light went out. “Now can you see me?”
    I heard his sneaking smile even in the dark, getting nearer, our bodies like homing pigeons for one another, no matter how long he’d been gone.
    “I can’t see anything.” I stepped forward, but he stopped me with an arm around my waist, restraining me against his body. Wrapped around me from behind, he made me feel small. Crushable. Why did this feel good? I asked myself later. Should I have been afraid?
    We stood there, conscious of our breathing. This was a feeling like love, I thought, if love was a pull, magnetic and inevitable as gravity. If it was a secret, best kept slow and steady and unspoken. Once, we had swung from the thick vines that grew along the trunks of our backyard trees like strangler figs. He caught me when I flew across the patch of ferns below. He held me half a second longer than necessary to right my footing, the near fall staged for the express purpose of knowing whether he’d catch me. I suppose I had always been attached securely around his trunk, leaching what nourished the center of him. Or feeding it. It was hard to tell the difference, to pinpoint whose pulse triggered and whose pulse chased.
    My brother appeared in front of us and we stepped away from each other, caught. “What are you