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Dusk, June 5th, 2006, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Freshly turned twenty-five year old Molly Freberg was jogging around a three mile lake, clothed in emerald sweatpants, baby-blue sneakers and a golden tank-top with white spaghetti straps. Her sun-speckled cocoa hair was held atop her skull in a loose bun which she presently slowed from a jog to a trot in order to manage. She had been running for nine minutes, huffing more than expected as she crossed an arching stone bridge. Distant skyscrapers of the downtown visible on her right; Colonial homes stacked with red bricks, 1776, and a slow rolling sedan staggered by on her left. Approaching on the black topped path, two young mothers with strollers; a gaggle of geese, ready to snap; brak, bark, squack, skack. Molly looked away from the women and babies and desired to kick a rock towards the geese. Vicious creatures after crumbs, dumbly swarming their young. She followed the sloping trail as it descended towards the lakeside, her body barely trotting, her foggy mind wandering. A lawn of green grass widened between her and the residential road now over her left shoulder. An approaching bench on her right sat lakeside, erratically shaded beneath a trio of weeping willows, their overgrown grassy branches sifting in the early evening wind.

I’ll walk the last two.

No explanation. Water washes, I’ll call it rain. Crests of the tide. Born bubbling in the semeny foam. Seashells seaside radiant under summer sunlight; wringing the sand from your fingers. Mother tanning, father gripping a beading bottle of white wine. Fire shone black hair coning in the algae wind. No root nor stem to cling the thought to the slimy seaweed stones. Mossy sponge soft rock in the palm of my hand. Pink plastic shovel, scooping white sands. We wandered along the strand; and he said: the sea. Crown of oyster shell, polished steelcream pearls within the whites of waves. Bulbous sinking feeling in the bottom of ‘ere gut when the liquor is honeysuckled. Dublin; Cork County; Ireland. Tea tower; castles. And he said, the sea, the sea. Celts and smelts breadcrumbs cornmealed fishes sweet mustard steely tang. Ping on the plate, knife to fork. That was down in Montpellier; ‘twas June or hoon or some time aboot then when Danu Ma-Morning forgot the shoogar in Papi’s tea. Standing suddenly Mum remembers. Two cubes splash into the coffee stained cup, speckling his tie with tiny tan spots. Tie was tan too. He slapped her robed ass and said, Thank you. If you see Dear Misses — wait what was the time? Never one said who had a cat we did. Oh right. We did. Left him behind. Finneus T. Paws. As they argue over appointments I gaze down on the cereal sog in my wood grained bowl; soy milk. Lactoose. Combfates. Jamva. Dress in a knot, cut below the knees. Mum come see. Just drink your juice.

Molly arched her back and stepped from the path towards the green bench. With stiff wrists she lowered herself onto the painted green planks. On the yonder shore, behind distant rows of elms the sun was setting into clouds of foggy fox red-orange and the treetops leafy green. Musky dust motes mingled amidst the fading sunbeams as Molly smelled the air so sweet she smiled. Staring open eyed, she tasted with her tongue tip the saliferous sweat wetting her lower lip and wiped her forehead with the back of her right wrist. The water was layered in shiny dimes; lambent lake diamonds sparkling the surface as the rain clouds clawed closer. Coming in, going out. Some crimson crackling between black clouds. Can smell the ions in the air. The geese squak, skack. Gaggled when she was a little girl. Vicious for crumbs. Fly away, it’s nearly night. Maybe I should walk more often. Build stamina. Not drink so much wine before bed. Not drink so much wine.

She relaxed against the sun warmed back of the bench, baking her exposed copper-brown skin and stretched her long tan legs, pointing the tips of her shoes towards the water. Her calves twitched and she felt a yawning relief shudder through the muscles. Thinking still of her father, twenty-five days buried, with the coming moon, twenty-nine nights dead. His brain snapped like a heart attack. That’s what they told her. That’s what she would remember; to told a poem of what then said.

Whoredom, what a mum. September one it was. Barcelona. Fleeting ships, sluggish ocean liners and cruise carriers, misting along the coast of the Mediterranean. Sloping shoulders of caramel women, black silken hair, swimming young legs; sandals, sunglasses. Say there. Steady. More flow, flow more. Father minding our way through the crowd. My hand held, firmly. Whey back when curdling custard siddy salt sea waves and sun castles, like Daddy did call them crumbled from the damp pebble poking cracks near my pink plastic pail. Hot sand pouring from his palms upon my lap. No dinner makes you thinner. Mum, come see. Mum, she saw.

Little Molly skipped along the promenade, her legs moving in double-time to keep pace with her preoccupied father. Mumbling self-reproaches, he drew her from the ground with a swing to speed their steps.

“El padre que tengo sed,” she fluidly asked while sprawling through the air.

“Quoi?” he answered giving her a straight look as she landed with a giggle. “What?” he translated though she quite understood.

The little girl bit her lower lip. She was only nine yet with her mother’s tutoring, spoke better Spanish than her father. The forty-two year old man still struggled for hello and goodbye.

Molly wondered whether to reply in Spanish or her father’s preferred second language, French, before releasing his hand, stopping and asking directly, “May I have a soda?”

“We’re already late.”

The waves were breaking against the beach. He watched the water lap and tried to trace the ivory swelling seashore into his mind. And how would you effectively write about that seagull? Or his partner with the limp wing? Impossible. All the birds have been taken and by better poets than myself. But what about those palm trees? Maybe a little rhymer there.

“But I’m so thirsty,” Molly begged, hoping his malleable heart would hear. The pretty young miss wore sunglasses framed with white plastic flowers and adjusted them before rushing her hands into the back pockets of her green skirt. People passed in stalled waves, splitting at the man and daughter who now stood apart, almost arguing.

“There’ll be a cold glass of water waiting for you, Molly.”

“But I want a soda, not water. Just a drink of one, even.”

“Maybe you can have a soda when we get there.”

“But she’ll say ‘no.’ Daddy please.”

He took her hand from her pocket and swung her to his right side.

Standing before a street vendor, the father held up a single finger. As his hand fumbled over clapping coins in his pocket, Molly took the cola and sipped, smiling, saying, “Gracias, papa,” mousy and genuine. He led her eight steps away from the street vendor and looked about, uncertain of where they stood. Molly, smiling and content now that she had the sweetness of the soda, offered the cool can of cola to her father.

“God, there’s a lot of people out here,” he complained.

“Aquí,” Molly said gently placing the beading can against his leg. “… Es Coke.”

“You don’t know where we are, do you?” he asked, taking the soda. “Were we here yesterday? I thought she said it was by a – what did she say about a mime?” He followed a clowning street performer, wearing a torn derby, singing while juggling black bowling pins. “She didn’t say anything about a juggling mime did she?” He took a swig of Coke.

Molly lowered her sunglasses and peered out from behind them. She saw nothing but knees.

“Daddy, we’re lost.”

“So you don’t know,” he accused. Dark women swarmed him, carrying bulging bags over their shoulders and speaking to one another too quickly. “This is a terrible time for your mother to look so bloody Spanish.”

Molly took back the can and drank from it with anticipation.

“Si,” she replied holding the Coke with two hands, always happy to agree with her father.

“But,” he said still looking, “when we’re back in London, unless there’s a cut—” He caught the eye of a very young woman, she smiled, he shifted his sight dumbly, suddenly, towards the hazy blazed beach. “Don’t say bloody.”

“Si.” She drank from the soda. “I know.”

He continued searching the crowd with squinting eyes for the pony tailed brown hair and chiseled-v cheekbones of his wife. He held the mirror to nature, to show virtue her feature.

That’s the afternoon we found her waiting at a table in the shade. Little yellow stucco café on the corner of a busy silver street. Your mother, I love her. Full in the striped green skirt; legs crossed beneath the table, salted sweat sticking in the bends behind her bony knees. Using my nickname while we sat: Miss Alyssa. Molly, though. “Right where she said she’d be.” Mimes.

“And well what kept you?” Mumbled we couldn’t find you. Took a menu from the table, removed his finger spotted glasses, cleaned them with a napkin, scratched his nose, checked the time. Asked offhandedly what she was hungry for.

She wore egg-shaped sunglasses and her dark hair was pulled tightly back while she sipped red wine from an obelisk like glass. My scraggly hairbun as I run. “Is she drinking a Coke?” Looked away and brushed his knee. My mother, I love her. Took the empty can from my hand and placed it on the table. He should know how she feels about me drinking soda. He always gives in too easily. Speaking like I’m not present. That’s when London was Oxford Street. Little Edmund and his mum, living up in the attic. They got a cat that’ll claw yer eyes, diggum deep. Watch the tail, it gets dodgy when he’s ought t’pounce, said Mr. McGregor the man who carried boxes and pulled on pipes. He said the dumbest things Daddy heard. Still invited him over for Christmas. Smelt like a pine tree and whiskey.

More she thought of London, Keyes and Keynes. Mice on the mats in Oxford Circus. Prostitutes of Piccadilly. Onward, ho. Parades. Pass by. The National Gallery, mum wants to go home. Seen enough Joyce. Wordsworth. Death mask. Gray clay on an old English gent. Mum needs to get sleep. One of us has to work. The poem he wrote. Siddy sea salt waves. Call you Stephenos, call you James. Christmas Day when she was ten, strolling along smoked cobblestones of The Thames; her and mother in black shoes and bronzed buckles. Smart young miss to have a hat. Beggars, brown bags and a schilling skipping. Big-Ben on the hour gonged the time. Ping. What is the meaning of Zen, they said. Ping-Ting comes for fire. Daddy always knows it.

An elderly couple passed in front of her. The husband wearing an auburn windbreaker, his wrinkly-rolled petite pink hands held behind his back while his wife pointed to the weeping willows, saying, Whatta a nice tree. Liverwurst, dimes. Molly looked, too. Smiling, she hoped to cross eyes with the woman but was unnoticed. Clap, clap the couple walked away. Molly did too, turning up the low hill towards the road, deciding to end the jog and go home.