Late that evening, when the sun was gold and thick on the cliff face, I returned to Zakrzówek. I was still in the parking lot when my phone sounded a cool blip like a raindrop. On the screen was a text from Jakub: a crying emoji, the blue of sorrow draining down through yellow flesh. I hope you can understand I’ve been touched this way too much, and I don’t take it anymore. The breath died in my throat. Had closeted Poles been rough with him, half-hating him even as they fucked? Even Marek hadn’t been kind. How was I better? Closeted too, leaping at him like a wolf. My mouth soured. And next, a text from Rosie: Landed early. Come get it, girl. I stared at the phone way too long, the day dimming around me. Then I tucked it into my pocket.

Even though the sun frosted the leaves such a rich yellow, even though it was warmer than earlier, the stone platform over the quarry was all but deserted. On the cliff, no one jumped. There were overlapping youths, asleep in street clothes. Rosie was in the dinky airport, checking her phone: impatient, horny, worried. Let her wait.

I found the section roped off for the boy. How had they pinpointed where he left earth? I stripped down to my swimsuit, the grass slimy on my bare feet. Jakub had swum through this water, between falling bodies and angry Polish teens, in a country that had outlawed abortion, forced out almost half of the Supreme Court, and allowed towns to establish themselves as LGBT-Free; he’d flashed his body, flirting openly with Marek, still so impossibly sweet. I lived across a river from Manhattan, and I was afraid to make a single move toward transitioning. Rosie loved me, and she loved adventure. There was a chance, if slim, she’d still want me. I lined up my toes with the edge of the cliff.

Thirty feet was not so much from above. Water looks like water from any height. The muscles in my legs twitched to jump, but I held myself solidly to the earth, squinting across the ripples to the array of tidy man-cut cliffs.

Below the surface, all that granite had been scraped out before the flood. Where was it now? In bathrooms in America, black and veiny and chic? In the dicks of horse sculptures, because monument horses were always male? In trinkets squeezed by anxious children? It didn’t matter. All of it was gone now, carted far away from here.