Cattail | David Daniel
I sink deep into the cloth bench seat of your chalk-white Corvair. We ease down cobblestone streets on a road that ends at the river, debris and driftwood ebbing in brackish swells. The screen door of the weather-beaten bait shop wheezes as you yank it open. Burying your hairy hand in peat moss, you show me a palmful of night crawlers wriggling in coffee grounds. Our final stop, that gravel lot beneath the drawbridge. There, you sweep a soft pack of smokes off the dash as I grab the worm bag. Our doors echo shut as we walk to the seawall, hauling tackle box, rods, and bucket. We sit on the damp bulkhead, the concrete cool on my thighs. Rigging up, you thread a worm on a thick tin hook. A bead of maroon blood oozes from its wound. Come my turn, I ask for bread instead. Shorn of crust, I wad the soft crumb on my barb. As I wait for my bobber to twitch, I gaze downstream at the marina. In the dawn fog, a yellow bus drops us campers off at the docks. Amid sheening sails and clanging masts, we master knots and moorings, even practice capsizing. At the end of class, we flout the foul river and swim to the sandbar. Perched on tippy toes, brown water lapping at our chins, we slosh algae in each other’s faces, our hair slick and slimy. Nearing shore, my crush wades up the muddy edge of the marsh. Her wet skin honeys in the sun, cattail furs swaying in a breeze behind her—an indigo one-piece flaring high along her inner thigh. I long for us to slip away into the wetlands, a lone blue heron as witness. But a diesel barge draws me away from my reverie. In the afternoon, we saunter up your tarry driveway, wending past red briar bushes and clouds of gnats. Your namesake son, a has-been horseman, opens the black lacquer door to let me in. He leans back against the kitchen sink, twisting the tip of his mustache, eyeing the whiskered fish that circles our plastic bucket. A few years later, we lose you to emphysema. Free of your yoke, this so-called uncle of mine settles on the loathed coast of our country, severing ties with his kin. Yet that moody girl from sailing still stands at the
mouth of the marsh. Hip-high in mire, she waits for me each sunset, lilac dusk awash with the rattle and trill of cicadas, their courtship hypnotic. Gliding eye-level with flitting dragonflies, we slip into a labyrinth of bullrush. An amber moment unchosen in youth, forever foreclosed by age.
David Daniel has published 19 stories in journals such as Bodega, Flash Frog, Doubly Mad, The Headlight Review, Vernacular, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, BULL, and elsewhere. He is quietly at work on a chapbook.