Event

From the Greek "venire", "event" is less conqueror than visitor. Yet also from the French "vent" and "éventrer": Wind or breath leaving a body in shock. And so both. A diplomatic mission and a scandal. A neighbor and an alien in disguise. Winter both the lover undressing a Sycamore and an Anaconda strangling mamal bones. Both the Saturday I met you and the Stonehenge circle your teeth bit into my arm.

The night the lake gave back what we threw in—keys, a ring, the small dog of someone's grief—we called it an event, as if water could schedule its honesty. I was nine. My father waded out past the part where fathers stop, and turned, and held up nothing, and grinned, and that was the thing that happened, the thing I keep returning to: a man, waist-deep in cold, choosing to surface empty-handed and pleased.