A framed photo of a boy and his dog sits on the roughhewn table with claw feet, and the angled cottage rises behind the boy in lines dark as charred bone. The boy squints and rests his hand on the dog’s head. We know not the dog’s name, although there may have been a time when we did. Time is like that, a receptable for all the things you once knew but can no longer hold. Time carries these moments for you. We believe Time has no gender, but if it did, it would be a girl, like us, because like us, Time marks everything.
Girls.
The old man who was once the boy in the photo calls us. Holding our gray dust rags, once bleached white cloth diapers, we approach. The man tilts his chin and asks, Where is Rudy?
We remember. That is the dog in the photo. The dog had red fur, and the boy had red hair, but you can’t see that. Now the old man’s hair is as shadowed as the silver with ivory handles that we polish in the spring.
We hold up the photo for the old man. Here is Rudy, we say. The man squints and points to the cottage in the photo. Am I here? He laughs, a sly laugh because he knows we know he knows where he is.
You are here, Uncle. We are here.
He is not our Uncle. He is the Dean’s grandfather and we are here at the cottage with Uncle while the Dean and all our parents are away in Europe for a month. It is a school trip and they are professors and we are too small to go but we don’t want to anyway.
Boskies, he says, and he reaches into his pocket for chunks of wrapped candy.
That’s what he calls us and it means water babies.
We put the photo back on the table. We pocket the candy for after choring. We dust.
It is our job to dust, and so every Monday we dust the cottage. The boy who is now a man who is our Uncle looks on, his vision sharp. Uncle sees dust in the sun’s rays. He says we will all be dust one day, and he sits back in his chair, his hand resting on another dog. A black dog. The dog closes his eyes. Uncle closes his eyes. He takes frequent naps like now, and we tippy around him in his white wicker rocking chair, dusting the windowsill so the view is clear. We washed the windows when we opened the cottage in the spring, yet they collect whatever floats by. Wax tears from a candle dot the glass. One of us scrapes them off with a fingernail and polishes the window. One of us removes the candle stubs from the three sconces and gently slips in bright blue candles, to be lit when the sun goes down.
Outside the window the water beckons, like a gold selkie waving. Selkies are not real, but water is. We walk on the rock the boy in the photo stood on. We look up the hill to a sister rock on which crumbles an old cottage. The boy in the photo slept in a tent in front of the old cottage while his sisters slept on pin-striped tick mattresses flattened by Time on bedframes with lathed spindles. The window in the listing old cottage sags.
The black dog follows us to the water and when we jump in, circles us, counting heads in dog barks. Only when we get out does he leave the water. We dry on the rock and when Uncle calls, we walk up the rock, past the spot where the boy and the dog in the photo stood. We pose, squinting, our hands midair where something we cannot touch is.
In the afternoon, Uncle takes us for a boat ride out in the open and we lean over port and starboard, staring into the deep, tracing the skeins of lake-floor white granite beneath the waves. Water sprays, cleaner than dust. We stick our tongues out and taste brilliance.
Uncle opens a tin of pork n’ beans for dinner. We give the clumps of white fat to the black dog when Uncle looks away, which he does so we can give the black dog the clumps of white fat. We put on our nightshirts, bleached white on the laundry line in the grove.
The sun goes down and a swash of purple stains the sky.
We light the candles and in the window frame we are flitting shapes. Uncle rocks in his chair. The moon and stars shine in the water. We are here by the window, inside the cottage, outlined in nightlight like charred bone.
We are six. Then we are still, framed in the moment Time collected.
Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.