In which she learns the lost children are never found, only remembered

It starts, it always starts,with her watching them and everything else blurring around them as they burst through the water’s skin (again and again) the years running off their limbs the water washing them back to what they were when she could still balance the weight of each of them in turn on her left hip.That’s how it starts. The next move is when she tries to blink the sight of them on to the back of her mind’s eye so she can pull them out like a photo from a drawer but her eyes water and cloud – so she tries something else: to throw words around them like towels, to pause the great gush of life of them into an aria she can sing (again and again) but the sun is so hot and anyway they’re doing something else now. It’s nearly over when she gives up,she forgets everything and her eyes clear.

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