“Look mommy, a dead lizard!”

“Good find, Cara,” Beckett says. “The circle of life.”

“It must have died a natural death.”

Unlike how Stephanie envisions her own—always by violent hand: rapists, murderers, terrorists—her body left contorted and broken, naked in a field, always naked in a field. The familiarity of this grotesque fantasy comforts her, the knowledge that the worst that could happen is murder, and her body, stripped of its clothes, be abandoned for a farmer to find.

Cara crouches over the tiny corpse, pokes it with a twig, touches it with her index finger.

            “No honey! Don’t touch!”

Cara looks up at her mother, finger aloft.

“We don’t touch dead things.”

            “Why?”

            “Because death…” The mysteries of which are ineffable.

“Is the end of life,” Beckett finishes for her. “And life is dangerous. So death is the most dangerous.”

Beckett nods at Cara with gravity, hands clasped behind his back, and walks ahead. His wisdom is refreshingly unorthodox, though its illogic can border on the absurd. Like his outfit: socks and sandals, grey sweatpants, and a golden lightweight down jacket.

“Better leave it for the goblins.”

“Goblins?”

“Yes. Goblins live in the swamp. Elves live in the forest. Don’t you know that by now? How old are you? Six?”

“Five and a half.”

“Well, everyone knows that goblins live in the swamp and elves live in the forest. Although there is a lizard man in the Scape Ore Swamp, but he’s an exception.”

Cara looks up at her mother for confirmation. Stephanie shakes her head no.

“It stinks here, Steph,” Beckett says.

A zephyr has carried the scent of the city’s sewage plant from upstream.

“It’s not normally like this.”

The odor is a small sacrifice for the modern convenience of waste management and the Riverwalk’s otherwise uncompromised beauty.

“Isn’t that a beautiful sandbar?”

Spindly branches grow from the islet, surrounded by riverwater that mirrors the topaz sky, the foamy slate clouds.

“It’s an alright sandbar. I wouldn’t call it beautiful.”

Beckett has no appreciation for tragedy. For him, life is various shades of beige—not gray; he hates cliché. 

            “I’m cold Mommy.”

            “Do you want my scarf?”

Cara holds out her tiny hands and Stephanie proffers the light green scarf she bought the week prior at Target, an accent piece not meant to protect her from gelid mornings so much as to enhance her pale blue eyes as the lily magnolias bloom. Cara drapes the rayon around her neck with a thespian air, reminding Stephanie of her younger self. It hangs below the hem of her pink coat, breathily teasing the cement path.

            “It is a beautiful winter day, though,” Beckett says.

            January is, for Stephanie, the longest month of the year. They pass under a low tree haunted by Spanish moss. And with Cara on winter break until the thirteenth; the lonely cold mornings in the office after dropping her off at school; the end of Stephanie’s relationship with Martin, the Estonian engineer, which had been decaying since September; twenty-minute drives across town on Friday evenings to pick Cara up at the apartment Stephanie and Evan used to share; Evan’s lack of financial support—any extra money he earns goes to paying off his rehab stint—and Stephanie’s poor pay, which leaves her barely enough income for food, rent, gas and a babysitter to watch Cara until she gets home at seven—the January slog is catching up to her. This was not how she imagined her life when she moved south with Evan for his job two and a half years ago.

            “I’m tired, Mommy. I want to be home now.”

            “I know honey, we’re almost back to the car.”

            “I don’t want to walk anymore.”

Cara’s face breaks into a tragic mask. Rivulets appear on each cheek, waxing their peach fuzz. Stephanie protests as a teardrop rounds her daughter’s chin, and before it can fall she takes Cara by the waist, picks her up, and hand cupping the back of her head, buries her face into her shoulder. Stephanie’s maroon pea coat absorbs the tears, her greatest enemy.

And while Stephanie is stronger than she appears, at five and a half years old Cara is nearly too big to be held this way. Ms. Savier reported that Cara grew more than an inch over break. Her legs knock at Stephanie’s knees with each step, as discomforting as the phase of Cara’s youth she wished away for an easier, better phase that still hasn’t come and probably never will. Such desires are youthful delusions and Stephanie’s youth is almost spent.

“Honey, Mommy’s getting tired. How about I give you to Beckett to ride on his shoulders?”

“No!”

            “Why don’t you sit on my shoulders then. Raise your arms so I can pull you up.”

            “On your left!”

            “On your left!” a woman repeats.

Cara is suspended in her mother’s arms, half sitting on her shoulder, half clinging to her neck, as the bikers pause, awaiting Stephanie and Beckett’s shift three feet to the left. In a swift motion fueled by the minor offense to the traffic hierarchy of wheel yielding to foot, Stephanie lifts Cara and plants her so she’s seven feet high. The bikers, neon-jacketed and gray-haired under shiny helmets, vanish around the next bend.

            “So Steph,” Beckett says, “what’s with your love life?”

            “Oh Beckett,” she sighs, adjusting Cara. Now comfortable, she can mentally devolve into self-parody before offering an answer: she the tower-bound wimple-wearing damsel, gazing across a valley to a church spire on the horizon; or the braless hippie, sitting on the back of a motorcycle, arms around the lower abs of a dark-haired man, her hair waist-long—which it’s never been—blowing behind them into a rainbow; or walking with a pail of goat milk back to her sleeping husband in their cabaña on the slopes of a dormant central American volcano: “If only I had a man with a motorcycle. A barrel-chested six-foot-three Latinx man who could whisk me away...”

“Come on. We both know motorcyclists have no money. And you still have dreams of being someone’s second trophy wife.”

“True. Cara’s friend Jamie, her parents ride motorcycles—they just moved here from Vancouver, who knows how, drugs most likely. The father Dylan does Tail of the Dragon. During our last conversation, he used the phrase “business meeting” at least eight times in a ten-minute span, insisting he had to leave quickly.”

“I know you want a heart surgeon. Fresh off a mid-life crisis, recently divorced, ton of dough.”

“Yes,” she sighs, envisioning shepherding Cara and her friends from soccer practice into a purple Lexus SUV. “Someone who can appreciate me. And who can send Cara to the best private schools. Only the best for my Cara.” She is not displeased to sound like her mother.

 “But how long could that last? We’re around lawyers all day. Surely heart surgeons are no different. Perhaps worse.”

Stephanie has never been attracted to the attorneys—the younger ones lanky and sandy-haired, wishing their youth away at twenty-seven; while those in their sixties are either paunchy, gray-haired and red-faced or gaunt and stoic, satisfied and bored. And then, perhaps she resents them for doing what she did not, having delayed her own dream of becoming Stephanie Morris, Esquire, when she found out she was pregnant. For years she told herself that real-world experience and motherhood was worth more than a career in law. But since her breakup with Evan and starting work at Dirker & Pinkel, reality’s leer has felt increasingly sardonic. At this point, law school is her final reset button.

Beckett says, “If you dated a lawyer you’d be bored after a few weeks.”

She shifts Cara on her neck. “Ugh, Cara, wouldn’t you like Beckett to carry you?”

“No.”

            “You’re heavy. It’s beginning to be a burden.”

“All children are burdens. That is the nature of being a child. Until they create their own burdens. Did you know that Buddha named his son Rahula, which means ‘chain’?”

“I did not.”

Cormorants sunbathe on the distant shore’s claystone. One spreads its wings, drying them in the sun.

“Some birds swim,” she says.

“What?”

“Who knows,” she sighs, “maybe I could be with a lawyer, a strong father figure to replace the one I lack.”

“Who could serve as a father figure for Cara too, so that she doesn’t grow up to repeat her mother’s mistakes.”

            It has occurred to Stephanie that Beckett could be a good match, though they are well ensconced in friendship’s benign quarters. They are both twenty-eight, after all. But there lingers the fear that a bold action would be rebuffed, a friendship harmed, and embarrassment shared—the status quo invariably more prudent.

And yet.

The parking lot comes into view through the bald cypresses and cottonwoods. “Almost there,” Stephanie says, more to herself than to Cara.

            “I have a feeling that you will soon enter into a more serious relationship with a man.”

“I hope so. Meanwhile I’ll be saving to move back north, which shouldn’t take more than a couple of years.” She affects her best Audrey Hepburn, “Mother so misses watching Cara grow up.” She bends like a camel and sets Cara on the turf. “Hey, where’s your scarf?”

“I don’t know!” Cara’s tears are past, past, as she runs to the Rav.

A sacrifice to the Riverwalk of this magnitude seems inconsequential, though a memory shard of those bikers dislodges from Stephanie’s brain and stabs her greenly. She turns to Beckett, considers asking him to go back to look for it, but the thought seems as presumptuous as the bikers’ insistence on their right of way. The scarf could be anywhere. Besides, Beckett is far too selfish.

“Want me to look for it?”

She studies Beckett’s face and locks her right eye with his: in that fisheye-lensed reflection are sky, clouds, car, and growing out of his dilating pupil into his cloudy blue iris, an image of herself.

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Daniel Adler was born in Brooklyn and raised in Portland, OR. He's studied at NYU, Edinburgh University, and University of South Carolina, where he teaches. His work has appeared in J Journal,The Broadkill Review, Expat Press and other literary magazines.