Today I will be driving, and the day will look like a button on summer’s ironed shirt. I will have the windows down and I will be sweating, and no sounds will reach my ears. It will be the regular drive, the drive that continues on like a ribbon wound around a spool. I’ll make a stop at a stop sign and wait to take a left turn. I’ll watch the kids cross in front of my car with their lunch bags and untied shoes, and I will think about the midway of a carnival somewhere.

It’s a carnival all right and you’re throwing baseballs at bowling pins. You’re good, too -- I’m surprised. You’ve got that pitcher’s arm. I’ve got popcorn stuck in my teeth and I’m watching your calves contract. You turn back to me, holding your stance, and I look up and you say nothing but the look you offer is a bucket full of water. You’re cursing me for doing what I’ve done with your calves but you’re too determined to move your feet to get close enough for physical abuse. You turn and you throw another ball and your earrings shake on the long lobes of your ears.

I can watch the bowling pins topple and I can smell the cotton candy and there you are in the middle of an empty parking lot in the winter cold with a full beer under your coat and a short skirt, and it’s after midnight. Your legs are cold and so are my hands -- when I touch you there’s an exact exchange of nothing under the lights. As you lower it into the back seat of the car you look at me, and the look is the kind that lets me know ten dollars and a bit of precision are worth a stuffed dinosaur.

Then I’m pulling up your hood and I kiss you just as a streetlight goes out and the wind blows in like a stroke of soft lessons. The lane is a glass blower’s dream of dew and fog. I can tell what you are thinking but I don’t say, and when the mustached carnival man closes the gate of our Ferris wheel cart you’re a little nervous, so you give me your mittens and tell me to warm my hands for a while. Now the streetlight goes out again and you’re smiling through a fading sunbeam as you submerge your toes in cool water. You’re sweating and I’m sweating but we still decide to move our bodies closer together along the edge of the dock.

“You’ve never tried cotton candy?”

There’s the broken pieces of the plate making specks of shadow on the floor -- you’ve done it now and that’s the expression you give to me; it’s a child’s expression that says I’ve done it this time, and you’ve got some cotton candy in your hair, in the front, and I’m there pulling it out as you point off into the distance from the top of the rotation. We listen to the bustle of people and you tell me how you never thought a place could be so silent -- the canoe rocking in the lake-water beside us. I notice the bead of sweat on your cheek from throwing so many baseballs. You tell me to carry you home, or at least to the edge of the parking lot, because this walk has been so long and cold in a short skirt and small shoes.

Then of course we see the fog over the grass made by a mixture of heat and dew and extinguished streetlights -- it’s a new darkness where we kiss and you say words that aren’t words, and we’re having breakfast in a café in Quebec City and you’re thinking along the edges of your skull while you put the extra bits of jam around the crust. I’m wondering then if you’ll have the guts to push me in the lake and if that will mean a collision or entanglement for years to come -- I will drag you in of course, down to the grass beneath the fog and you’re on top of me, and we’re fucking in the back seat of the car beside a stuffed dinosaur, green and stuffed, and you’re tall like ravine grass and I can feel the stubble on your legs when I drag you into the water with your dress still on.

You sip from the beer and you sing the one about the tree museum and we walk the parking lot to my house and when we finally arrive and check in the concierge only speaks in French and so to kill the time I feel the muscles in your right arm and make the simple jokes. You’re laughing even though I’ve ruined your dress and drowned your sinuses and that is the moment -- the first moment with the force of your arms, the push from your hands and wrists and your whole body sending me down into the lake. I turn the corner and enter the kitchen and there you are and there’s the plate, sliding like a sheet of ice from your hands, then bouncing and breaking apart against the force of the linoleum with a sound that doesn’t sound quite right.

Then I’ll make the left. I’ll keep driving. I keep driving now because there is always another stop sign somewhere in the world and because I can’t find the way home.

If I knew the way back to my house -- back through the garden and over the kinds of fences built for rabbits -- I’d take the key from under the mat and throw it into the expanse of the yard. It would be a sacrificial throw in which every heaving muscle works at once, and it would be a throw to help me again recall your body -- standing in a pitcher’s stance at the carnival midway. I would sit for a moment, and with deflated eyes I would reconsider the ball in your hand and how it flew, ironically now, like an asteroid that once struck the Earth.