I wake up totally bored. What am I going to do with the rest of my life? I’m twenty-nine. I get the note off the door and go back to bed.

I read it with the sheet pulled up over my head. The light is not very good but it is better than anything else I’ve come across today. It’s from a girl. She came by so quietly this morning and left it on my door.

The note is an apology for a bad scene she made the other night. It is in the form of a riddle. I can’t figure it out. I never cared for riddles, anyway. Fuck her.

I go get my daughter and take her to the playground at Portsmouth Square. I have been watching her for the last hour. From time to time I have paused to write this down.

I wonder if my daughter will ever leave a note on some man’s door in early April God-damn God-damn and he’ll read it in bed with the sheet pulled up over his head and then take his daughter to the park and look up as I just did to see her playing with a blue bucket in the sand.

One Afternoon in 1939

This is a constant story that I keep telling my daughter who is four years old. She gets something from it and wants to hear it again and again.

When it’s time for her to go to bed, she says, ‘Daddy, tell me about when you were a kid and climbed inside that rock.’

‘OK.’

She cuddles the covers about her as if they were controllable clouds and puts her thumb in her mouth and looks at me with listening blue eyes.

‘Once when I was a little kid, just your age, my mother and father took me on a picnic to Mount Rainier. We drove up there in an old car and saw a deer standing in the middle of the road.

‘We came to a meadow where there was snow in the shadows of the trees and snow in the places where the sun didn’t shine.

‘There were wild flowers growing in the meadow and they looked beautiful. In the middle of the meadow there was a huge round rock and Daddy walked over to the rock and found a hole in the centre of it and looked inside. The rock was hollow like a small room.

‘Daddy crawled inside the rock and sat there staring out at the blue sky and the wild flowers. Daddy really liked that rock and pretended that it was a house and he played inside the rock all afternoon.

‘He got some smaller rocks and took them inside the big rock. He pretended that the smaller rocks were a stove and furniture and things and he cooked a meal, using wild flowers for food.’

That’s the end of the story.