At One Time This Was the Longest Covered Walkway in the World

by Mary Miller

"I'm dead," the boy says.

"You're not dead," his father says.

"I'm dead," the boy insists, draping his body over the arm of his chair.

The people at the next table look at him, at me, and smile.

"Don't be weird, son," his father says, opening the boy's shark book.
"Look at this one--what kind is this?"

The boy looks at it. "Hammerhead," he says. His father turns the
pages, and he says: "Cow shark, prickly shark, zebra." He takes a swig of his root beer, which is in a brown bottle like our beers.

"Did you know that you shouldn't wear a watch or other shiny things in the ocean?" I ask the boy. "A shark will think you're a fish and try to eat you." He shakes his head. "It's the glint," I say, "like fish scales," tipping my bare wrist back and forth, but he doesn't know what a glint is. He's only four. I look at his father, my boyfriend, who is texting someone, probably his ex-wife.

The boy's burger comes and his father cuts it in half and the boy takes a bite out of one half and puts it down and then picks up the other half and takes a bite. My boyfriend waves the waitress over and asks for ketchup. I order another beer. There is something wrong with my stomach, an ulcer maybe, and I know I shouldn't be drinking but I seem to be incapable of living the kind of life where I eat nutritious meals and exercise and go to bed early, or I can only live like this for a short period of time before fucking it all up again.

Flies circle the boy's burger. One lands on the edge of the basket and makes its way along the rim. The boy and I watch it while my boyfriend stares at his phone. The fly moves so fast I can't see its individual legs; then it stops abruptly and crosses one leg over another and scrubs them together. I wave my hand around. My boyfriend sets his phone down and unfolds a napkin, lays it over his son's food.

It is August, too hot to be sitting outside. I look at the kid, who would never pass for mine, and hate him a little. He has a white scar that snakes up the middle finger of his left hand (from a skateboarding accident when he was two, he tells me), blond hair, and brown eyes. My boyfriend's eyes are blue. I want to ask my boyfriend what color his ex- wife's eyes are because if they're blue then the boy isn't his and we could be spending our nights alone. And I wouldn't have to cringe at the way my voice changes into one I don't recognize when I speak to his child.



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