i’m out of the way of foot traffic, though folks are often startled when they notice me. i’m seated in a beach chair between parked cars on noll street, along the south side of green central knoll park, the local ballfield. we tossed a frisbee here in 2016, the morning you all arrived for my bachelor party. the park is locked now until further notice, the outfield grass overgrown, the infield dirt in need of a rake. three stiff orange cones patrol the outfield. they’ve been there for months.

my yeti canister is filled with cold beer and stands beside me in the road. the sun is low in the sky. 

what fantastic entries, boys. having given them another read through, i look up to gather my thoughts before returning to my phone to begin drafting a reply. i think about marriage, how more stories end with weddings than begin with them: the final shot of mike nichols’s the graduate comes to mind, as does the musical oklahoma. i took hoke to see the show’s recent minimalist revival at circle in the square when he was last in town, murph. curly shot judd point blank. an explosion of blood soaked curly and laurey’s wedding whites, just like when i blew off casey’s head in edinburgh. more personally, <quote-01>i recall the crushes i had on each of your high school girlfriends prior to either of you knowing them<quote-01>, the feelings of rejection. i think of my series of short-lived adolescent flings and the anxiety i felt from hooking up with one while still with another. i think of <quote-02>tom and katie<quote-02> and of sharon and myself.

i’m about to re-open our document when i see it. like the water balloons launched at me from across the church parking lot, it appears motionlessly suspended in air on its low-flying approach across the field. at first it could be any other street pigeon or house sparrow, but as it draws closer, i recognize it is not. i see white strips of feather beneath its wings as it passes directly overhead, a red-brown fan of a tail. it alights on the elementary school’s second story air conditioner behind me before disappearing into the window’s dark reflection of the empty sky.

sarah keeps asking if i finally saw the famous neighborhood hawk when i return from my park-side outings. she’ll walk around the park with cooper and more often than not spot the hawk flying from fencepost to rooftop. it was stationed in the grass in the outfield the first time she saw it, a billed statue. is that a fucking hawk? she thought. i’ve noticed passersby standing around, their toy dogs in arm, hoping to catch a glimpse of the local bird of prey.

the once orange glow above the buildings opposite is now a dull strip of beige, not unlike the infield dirt, and to tilt my head backward as i did with the hawk’s passing is to follow a spectrum of ever darkening blue. the moon is a thumbnail address in the upper left of my frame of the sky. the hawk takes back to the air directly and flies out of sight. i should go back to the house now. sarah is churning our first vanilla ice cream of the summer.

you know, it’s a shame the word has such bland and humble literary connotations because vanilla is truly ice cream’s finest flavor, feigmann said during one of our recent virtual chess matches. upon hearing this, sarah’s knee-jerk response was, that’s not true, chocolate is. <quote-03>i loved both feigmann’s original posit and sarah’s reaction<quote-03>. side note, and point for feig: the first batch of vanilla sarah and i made was the keenest and most satisfying we’d ever tasted. we’ll see about tonight’s.

i kick over my yeti canister as i get up from my beach chair, spilling some beer in the street. i thought i’d finished it; i guess not. the final swig is still cold but far from a mouthful.

the last hawk i saw was on kiawah island, south carolina, famous for its golf courses and its alligators. sarah’s father greg rented a house there last summer and invited us down along with her brother chris and his fiancée. greg’s cousin dick lives on the island; he’s been there for years. the four of us joined greg and his wife for an extended weekend of barbecue, day drinking, and lazing on the beach. sarah and i spent hours beneath the rented umbrellas, watching the broad atlantic tide ebb atop great stretches of sand, <quote-04>binds<quote-04> of sandpipers scurrying back and forth, rapidly stabbing the damp terrain for their hidden meals.

the first night of our stay sarah started spotting. her period wasn’t due for another week, but after the d&c a few months prior (dilation and curettage--the midwife’s recommended procedure to help sarah through her miscarriage), she was aware that the timing of her next few periods would be a little erratic as her system returned to normal. she wasn’t concerned, but she was unprepared. she asked chris’s fiancée taylor if she had anything she could use, and taylor discretely gave her a handful of tampons. the spotting soon went away.

on our final full day on the island, cousin dick invited us to the private beach club to which his family belongs. his daughter and her three young kids were in town vacationing as well, so we were quite a little crowd. some sat in the pool while some drank in the shade. the kids went down to the beach to play in the sand. greg went around with his camera taking auto-exposed pictures. over lunch cousin dick told us about a recent encounter with one of the island’s famed alligators. he was out with his daughter and the grandkids, riding bikes along one of the island’s many flat, winding trails. they turned a corner and there it was. the alligator reared up on its hind legs like a bear, dwarfing the family. it let out a jurassic roar before returning to all fours and gliding back into the ground cover.

i requested a decaf after lunch, but they didn’t have any brewed. i told them not to bother.

the six of us thanked dick for a lovely afternoon and headed back to the house; we had a few hours to kill before dinner. greg had made a reservation at one of the island’s finer dining establishments, and we were all looking forward to getting dressed up and being waited on. sarah and i hung out by the pool with cooper while the other two couples retreated to their rooms. i floated in a couple of innertubes--one that i sat in and another for support behind my head--reading ben lerner’s 10:04. i had also brought with me a paperback of the final volume of knausgaard’s my struggle, but opted for the shorter work i could sooner digest in its entirety. sarah lounged poolside with her true crime podcast, and cooper busied himself with a bully stick. i’d kick off from one end and slowly float along, using my legs as propellers when needed. at the other end i’d spin myself around with my legs and kick back off, my time in the shade lengthening with each pass as the sun lowered behind the house.

sarah went inside with cooper to shower and get ready. a few minutes later i got a text asking if i could come upstairs.

there was blood on the floor of the bathroom. sarah, naked, was trying to stop cooper from licking it up. she’d started cramping by the pool, she said, and after removing her bathing suit, had passed a quarter-sized mass.

christ, babe. you alright? / i don’t know. can you take the dog, please?

she wore to dinner every pair of underwear she had, a fistful of taylor’s tampons in her purse. twice she excused herself from the table, both times returning with a fear in her eyes and a strong grip for my hand. she wore her sweater around her waist as we left for the car.

back at the house, as the family tucked in for the night, we sat in our room with cooper, searching for answers on our phones. sarah decided she needed pads instead of the tampons. it didn’t seem safe to be plugging up what the body was trying to shed. unfortunately, places on the island were closing, and our best bets were a half-hour away. i can knock on his door? ask to borrow the keys? i offered. he’s gonna insist he drive, she said.

greg? yeah, sounded about right.

what are you gonna tell him? she asked. we hadn’t told anyone about the miscarriage, and sarah preferred to keep it that way. i got you, i said, wondering whether it wouldn’t be wiser to put her in the car instead, head in the opposite direction to the emergency room in charleston, our secret be damned. but she promised she’d stay in touch. she’d found a couple hotlines and was going to try and get a nurse on the phone.

with greg, i elected for the partial truth: look boss, sarah’s period came early. i don’t know what to tell ya, got to run to the store. penance for our sins? an hour of crosby, stills & nash sing-along for me and a loop of on-hold elevator music for sarah.

at one point she texted that she was getting worried, that the cramping was growing more intense; then a short while later, she thought that maybe she was in the clear. when i returned to the house, i--again--found her with the dog in the bathroom. how we doing? i asked. she looked tired, but also alert, as if she’d seen a ghost. i followed her eyes to the back of the toilet, to the stack of paper towels on which she’d placed what looked remarkably like a chicken liver. the bleeding, thankfully, had stopped.

often on the trip i thought how perfect the location would be for a vacation with the guys. we’d assign handicaps for golf, and when the tide was out, we’d have great expanses of damp sand at our disposal, like a giant ice rink, smooth and even.

just think, instead of seeing who’d win in a wrestling match--pat or andy--it’d be, which one of you idiots is gonna be the first to grab that alligator by the <quote-05>tail<quote-05>!

the following morning sarah and i leisurely rode fat-tire beach bikes along quiet paved roads and meandering wooded trails, beneath cascading falls of spanish moss, through columns of soft light suspended from the foliage. 

it was then that this hawk--the last one i saw--dove from a tree and into the underbrush just up ahead, its talons splayed and wings wide, its body leaning backward in opposition to its head, its belly exposed--not unlike my posture in this beach chair as i write to you both on my phone. without touching down it lunged forward into its takeoff position just above the earth, clutching at the damp air with a few forceful swipes of his wings, and displaying for sarah and me the spoils of his purposeful descent: a length of curly black snake dangling from his grip.

the ice cream was indeed fantastic, but it wasn’t that first batch.