Joy for Beginners

by Erica Bauermeister

She couldn’t remember the last time she had really looked up and paid attention to anything higher than the top of her children’s heads. She had spent the past eight years looking at the ground ahead for things that would trip them, or behind for things they had dropped. The world had diminished to a height of four feet. And yet here it was, with a sky full of birds.

She simply didn’t have an interest in men anymore. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them; she just knew how easily they broke.

Kate watched as Patty’s oar boat met and crashed through the first wave, disappearing under the river and shuddering up like a horse pulling itself out of the thick mud-water. Thousands of pounds of water. Kate had never thought of water as weight before, but she did now, as she watched it churning upon itself, clawing at the sides of the canyon it had created.

This water eats rocks, Kate thought, in a moment of clarity. I am in a rubber boat.