The River You Touch by Chris Dombrowski

Author:Chris Dombrowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

A loss of faith, Mary tells me at breakfast, begins with a loss of ritual.

“Go hunting for the day,” she says, tapping her midsection. “Your gut will feel better with some exercise.”

“Yours is the one I’m worried about,” I say. “I don’t want to be away if you suddenly go into labor again.” I butter Luca’s waffle, tilting the yellow wheel of processed wheat along its rim so that each of the square recesses fills with melted Land O’Lakes, then sprinkle a heaping spoonful of powdered sugar across the oily spill.

Sitting at the table, Luca scratches his inner thigh, which is chaffed from a recent encounter with a patch of stinging nettles. These days he is all body, ever ready to tumble or scrap. When playing a game of catch, he demands passes that require him to dive onto the ground after the football rather than ones thrown directly into the breadbasket. Indoors, his preferred pastime is one of our own invention in which he attempts to run across the living room through a maze of couch cushions while I bomb pillows at his knees, trying to take him out. When he tumbles, bright laughter runs like sparks from his toes to his scalp.

“What’s wrong with your belly is you’re fat,” he says.

I set the plated waffle down in front of him.

“I’m just bloated,” I say, slapping my midsection.

“No, you’re fat,” he says, folding the waffle in half like a taco and hoovering a mouthful. “Everybody knows it.”

From her gray office chair, Mary shrugs affirmatively. “Daddy’s belly is really irritated. There’s a little hole in his stomach, in the stomach lining, where there’s not supposed to be a hole.”

Luca noshes on the waffle and seems to consider this. “Is there a baby trying to get out. Like Mommy’s?”

“No, bud. No baby.”

The irony is not lost on me: agonies of childbearing versus the inconvenience of a sour gut. Mary scoffs whenever I wince while plucking eyebrows. “If men had to deliver babies…” she says often, and leaves this phrase lingering, not needing to connect another clause. This morning I’ve eaten a bottle’s worth of antacids, a chalky meal that availed only rancid belches, but the pain is only alleviated when my knees are pressed to my chest or when I’m facedown, a couch cushion sandwiched between my stomach and the floor. Presently I feel like I’ve swallowed a handful of sidewalk-sharpened jacks that carom off the walls of my stomach and esophagus.

“Just keep your phone on and don’t get further than an hour away,” Mary says. She wheels her chair over to the pantry, takes Luca’s Spiderman lunch box off a shelf. “If you can get his lunch together, I’ll call someone to walk him across the street to school.”

Slapping a sandwich together for a child’s school lunch should be a simple enough task for a parent to undertake. But when there’s no organic peanut butter in the pantry or when, owing to dirty dishes, said parent packs a plastic spoon with the non-biodegradable yogurt container in the lunch box, several vectors of guilt converge.

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