Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Summer in Giverny  
William Kelley Woolfitt

In my idle hands, I tossed the paper brigantine that had been folded my cousin’s exact way. I was staying at my uncle’s chateau that sticky summer. I was thirteen; she was almost twenty. I had watched her slender fingers as she marked, creased, and flattened the boat she’d promised to shape, and as she preened, and perfumed her earlobes, wrists, and neck.

When I asked her to resume the Italian lessons she had taught me the summer before, she gave me a small painting: the Sacred Heart in a bracelet of thorns. In her room again, she pinned her curls, and puckered her dark red mouth. She kissed the air, practicing for her beau, a

*

For my confirmation, she gave me Bossuet’s Elevation of the Soul. Flint struck steel. Although my faith rose like a flame, I had nothing to feed it. My life was all green wood and gangly limbs that I roused, refused to prune.

*

I stole my cousin’s hair ribbons, braided and knotted them to form a multicolored snake. I loaded her toy boat with ants, set it afloat on my uncle's fishpond, and then angled a magnifying lens to catch the sun, and filled the boat’s paper folds with wisps of fire. Why did I feel the heat, as if I was beneath that lens, weak as paper, smoldering like a stick? I leapt to my feet, shucked off my clothes. Diving into the pond, I scared two carp that were pale as lard, and whiskery, and fat as my arm.

Staying under, I watched the alchemy of displaced water—water that clouded as my toes wiggled, and sunk into the muck, and then stirred and stirred.
n oaf with beefsteak hands, who spoke to her in grunts and burps.

 

William Kelley Woolfitt studies American literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he is in the third year of the PhD program. He has worked as a summer camp counselor, bookseller, ballpark peanuts vendor, and teacher of computer literacy to senior citizens. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review.