Up Through the Water by Darcey Steinke Read Free Book Online

pictured a miniature of himself and the court, then him shooting the ball. He imagined that small version with a still smaller one, court and boy, then another tiny set, until there seemed to be a point like the speck of dust one sees in beams of light.
    Lila pedaled her bike up, an outdated thing with a red banana seat, plastic ribbons whipping out from the handles and colored straws on the spokes. It was a funny kind of a bike, one he'd have made fun of in Tennessee. “Hey,” Lila yelled to him.
    “Where are you going?” Eddie asked, holding the ball under one arm.
    “Down the beach road,” she said.
    He bounced the ball in a slow rhythm and listened to it thud on the asphalt.
    “I wanted to tell you not to say anything,” she said.
    “Don't worry about that, Lila,” he said.
    She turned her face to the sun. He remembered her as she had been last night: first wild on the pony and then thin on shore, deflated like a wet animal.
    Lila held her hand up to shield her eyes from the everywhere light. “I'll meet you after dark at the docks, okay?”
    He nodded and watched her turn, pushing down hard with her tennis shoes on the fluorescent pedals.

FOUR
    BLOW SMOKE
    B irdflower flipped burgers at the Trolley. His long braid moved on the back of his T-shirt over Allen Ginsberg's nose, then across a bespectacled eye. Lila tacked another order above the grill and then jumped onto the kitchen counter, crossing her legs Indian-style, “Got any weed?” she asked.
    Birdflower looked up. “Maybe,” he said, putting down sesameseed bun halves on the black grill.
    “I see you puffing out by the dumpsters. You shoo away the cats and lean against the backside.”
    “What's it to you?” he said, squinting at Lila.
    She played with a long strand of hair at the back of her neck. “I could tell, you know.”
    Birdflower pressed his spatula on the frying burgers; grease oozed up through the silver in a pattern like dog bones.
    Lila's white leather sandal clicked against the bread warmer. “You never tell me anything,” she said.
    The owner rounded the grill. Lila hopped down with a thud onto the linoleum. “The health inspector would go crazy if he saw you sitting up there,” he said.
    “With longing,” she said, her shorts seesawing as she walked over to the ice cream cooler.
    “I need two sundaes,” the owner continued. “And stop tormenting Birdflower.”
    Lila made a face as she bent half her body into the icy whiteness of the cooler. Waist up, she was a ghost swirling in fog. She set two scoops of vanilla, like tiny planets, into paper bowls, and added chocolate sauce from a can so sticky she had to pull hard to get it from the wooden shelf.
    She leaned way over, feeling the strings of her cutoffs tickling the backs of her legs, and looked to see if Birdflower was watching. He stared straight at the grill. Lila reached into a jar with two fingers and arranged cherries on the ice cream. She pushed the sundaes through the space on the counter and rang the ladybug bell. Over the fan and grease sizzle of the friers, Lila said, “I don't need your stuff anyway.”
    Birdflower turned toward her and slouched back against the grill. “That's good,” he said. “ ‘Cause you ain't gettin’ any.”
    Lila looked at his eyes. They were set back and shriveled underneath and at the corners like old peaches. His face was similar to her father's, though her father wore his hair in a short brush cut, and his scalp was always freckled with red spots of peeling sunburn from days on the boat. There was something weathered but not settled about Birdflower, Lila thought, something like the see-through dome her aunt sent from Florida, with its tiny plastic palm trees and girls sitting cross, legged on the beach. Sand filtered in the air like visible atoms when it was shaken. As it slowed, the flat background of boats and MIAMI written in tiny oranges showed against blue sky. Birdflower's face was settled like that—you knew once it