Swimming Through Time

Arthur sat on the back porch, watching seven-year-old Emma chase the ghost of a memory across the lawn. She moved like something possessed—arms flailing, eyes glazed—what the children called 'the zombie dance' from some game or another. He smiled, remembering how his own mother would have clucked her tongue and declared such things undignified. Now, he just found it charming.

"Grandpa! Emma's doing the zombie again!" little Toby called from the sandbox.

"Let her be," Arthur said, though he wasn't sure anyone heard him over the splashing. Emma had abandoned her zombie performance for the pool—swimming with that fearless abandon only children possess. Arthur's joints ached in sympathy. He remembered swimming in the old quarry hole, the water so cold it stole your breath, how he'd stayed under until his lungs burned, just to see if he could. Children measured themselves against the world then. Now, everything was measured in likes and follows.

His pocket buzzed—that confounding iphone his daughter had insisted he needed. Emma's mother had set it up with pictures of the grandchildren as wallpaper. Sometimes Arthur forgot how to use it, his thick fingers fumbling across the smooth glass like a man trying to read braille with work gloves. But he kept it charged, kept it close, because Emma had once said, "Now you can see us whenever you want, Grandpa." That was worth the frustration.

"Grandpa, look!" Emma had discovered the goldfish pond, her wet face hovering inches above the water. "They're kissing!"

Arthur joined her on the stone bench. The goldfish—orange comet, calico fantail, the black moor he called Midnight—circled each other in their ancient, silent dance. He'd bought the first dozen for fifty cents each at the five-and-dime, back when you could still buy things for pennies. That was forty years ago. These were descendants of descendants, swimming through the same water their ancestors had, carrying something of Arthur forward into a future he wouldn't see.

"They're not kissing, sweet pea," Arthur said, draping a towel over her shivering shoulders. "They've been together longer than I've been alive. They're just... being together."

Emma considered this, her brow furrowed with that delightful seriousness children wore when puzzling through the world's mysteries. "Like you and Grandma?"

Arthur's throat tightened. Marie had been gone three years come August. "Yes," he managed. "Like that."

"Grandpa?"

"Yes, Emma?"

"When you're a zombie—" she giggled at her own joke "—will you still remember the goldfish?"

Arthur pulled her close, smelling chlorine and childhood and something that might be the very essence of hope. "I'll remember them," he said softly. "And I'll remember you, swimming in the afternoon light, and how the world felt when it was still opening up instead of closing down."

Emma nodded, satisfied with this answer, and returned to watching the fish—these small, silent beings who carried his father's love through time, who knew nothing of iphones or zombies, only the simple truth of water and light and the endless circling of days.