She is babysitting only in the loosest sense of the word. The two boys are in the deep end, sitting on some pool noodles. She’s in a deck chair, reading a novel that is neither literary nor pulpy, sipping red bull through a straw, sunglasses on. The boys are playing a game of hit the shit, where they slide one of the three pool noodles out from under their bottom, swing it around like a lasso and thwack the other over the head with it, screaming hit the shit, hit the shit, hit the shit. The noodles throw off high arcs of water with each shit that is hit.

     She reaches the end of a chapter and rests the book on her abdomen. Her whole
body is in shade. She cannot tan, merely burns. Her skin is medically pale. What should they do for dinner tonight? An enormous hawk swoops in and dives at the children. Screams erupt from the pool. She shoots up from the deck chair, thumb still inserted in the book, and her sunglasses fall off and sink to the bottom of the shallow end like a diving stick. The hawk is back up in a tree.
     “I could feel it,” says the boy who doesn’t live here, holding his head as if searching for scratches. “It felt like a bullet,” he says excitedly. He means the wind off the wings of the bird. “It almost took my head off,” he insists, pointing to his head. The boy who lives here has fallen off his noodles and is standing on his toes, keeping his chin above the water, jaw open in a wide grin. The bird came no closer than ten feet to the boys.
     The hawk shoves off towards the woods. “Everyone okay?” she says, looking around the pool area, as if to include the deck chairs in the question. Yes, they say, yep. After a few minutes, the boys are back to laughing. They do some water-based impressions of the hawk and find their way back onto their noodles, pinging around the pool like billiard balls in slow motion. She lays back down and reads another chapter.
     The afternoon sun hides behind a sheet of cloud, chasing the boys from the pool. They change, leaving their wet bathing suits on the floor of the laundry room. The ornate tile is cold to the touch. She’s supposed to dry them, but can’t figure out the machine. There are too many options, with terms like Cool Start and Air Fluff. After a minute of searching for just Dry, she pushes buttons at random until the thing starts up. When she walks by the door to the finished basement, she hears them talking about how cool it was, their surprising animal encounter. They have only seen an animal like that in captivity, never in the real world.

 

 

(Continued)