It was raining. Josie had just finished grocery shopping – not a necessary grocery shopping trip, but she’d had to drop in on Dan the Man’s tanning business – always unpleasant – and so she’d talked herself into stopping in at the Asian grocery store next door, making a mental shopping list as she walked and everything on it was candy. At the last minute, before checking out, Josie had added a couple blocks of tofu to her basket. She actually loved eating tofu. That wasn’t why she bought it, though, and she thought, Come on, you’re more independent than that now, right? Like – what did she need to care about checkout lady-judgment? But I like tofu, Josie thought. She’d wanted to put the tofu back, just to show she didn’t care, but now it was there in her basket and she really wanted to eat it. She bought the tofu, and she smiled at the checkout lady and she took her groceries and her money and walked towards the door and shoved everything down into her big black shoulder bag, and then she looked up and looked through the store’s front windows and the big glass doors and she saw that it was raining, really, really hard.Outside - it was big puddles opaque from ripples and slick dark pavement everywhere and little impacts on cars and the storefronts turned gray and muted and distant, the trees beyond them darker and green and blurred – the kind of rain that’ll soak you. Josie thought - Man.
And the memory came up. Josie, a little kid, thigh-deep in creek and wet through and through, pelting rain on her head and her bare arms – all slick in the rain – rain on the creek beside her, matching the splashes of her legs as they pumped through the water which was running too swift, swifter than normal, pulling at her and running past her legs in turning, confusing currents – a canvas pack on her back, a machete in her hand –
How old was I? Josie thought. She was smiling, in the grocery store, the kind of smile the Josie wouldn’t even notice until she felt the change in the muscles in her face.
Josie thought back – trying to do the math, to anchor this memory to a particular year – no. She guessed nine or ten but it was only because of the picture she had, the image, of her bare thighs in the water and they looked like they could be a ten-year-olds, maybe –
Holding the machete – the stream bed so uneven under her feet, toes grasping in the sand, spread as wide as they’d go and dug in, but the sand moved even then, falling away, and Josie thought of the feel of how it had been, tipping and tilting and scrambling to stay upright, the pull of the current such a force on her legs and water everywhere, the unsteadiness of it -
Josie remembered: probably why she remembered all of this at all, probably the reason the rest of it was clear – the duck head. Josie remembered: the plants around the creek grew close over the surface of the creek – salmonberry bushes, bright green leaves, thin, strong stalks, all bent against each other, meeting in the middle and leaning and growing together, a tunnel of green, harmless except it was thick and except watch for the Devil’s club –
Josie didn’t remember but she pictured the Devil’s club plants now and figured that on this particular day from her childhood, on the day of the duck head, there was no reason why her palms shouldn’t have held a Devil’s club thorn or two. She figured her childhood palms usually did. She remembered the pain of it – a hand, reaching out, grabbing for the undergrowth and instead closing in on a branch and inch thick with a thousand narrow thorns –
But that was a different day.
Josie remembered the water, the feel of it, and she remembered looking ahead and upstream, the surface matte and bumpy with rain and the current so strong – and the duck head speeding toward her. She remembered thinking of ducklings – did she think she duck head was a duckling? – and she knew she thought of ducklings because the duck head was the right size. And because it had a face. The smallness of the duck head in its entirety made its big face cute. For an instant – and that was why she thought of ducklings.
And then revulsion, and then the swiftness of it, the incredible speed, that the duck head approached and flowed past her leg, that instant, inches from her thigh and no time to move and then, Josie remembered, she’d turned so quickly to keep it in her sight, to watch, flowing away –
That was all. Josie stared at the gray downpour beyond the windows and frowned.
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