boat

Into this scene, precarious and improbably, bobbing on uneven oars and spun halfway backward into the segment of visible water upon the lake below Szejmcaj appears, his blond son at the bow of the rowboat borrowed from the cottage of the man who watches them, the boy wrapped in a neon yellow life jacket and leaning halfway out to touch the water, pensive even from this distance, and the other child, Obie, propped at the center of an inner tube on the bottom of the leaky boat, body swathed with an infant’s orange life jacket, his arms and legs each cuffed with bright plastic air-filled flotation rings making him look like a harlequin.

The rower wore his velvet opera cape and a crushable, brimmed camouflage fishing hat. Dark-haired, sinewy bare forearms jutted from beneath the cape as he chopped at the water with the oars, working to keep aright and within sight of his wife, the hoped-for savior, and the cottage above while trying to keep his toddler son from pitching over the bow and floating away.

(He does not expect you to believe any of this, although he swears it is the truth as it happened on that small lake in the north some time ago.)