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Galleynipper
Where we might go, in the summers, to a cabin on the big lake and spend time there in the light, my sister and I, doing nothing, playing in the sand, slowly turning brown and learning to see through the glare, my mother with her book, her sunbonnet, and nights in that room of open rafters, curtains drawn against a cold wind off the bay: if we were good she would let us have one candle, in a saucer on the deal table, in the exact center of our bedroom, that we could not touch, but only watch making shadows among the iron headboards, the rafters, the curved frame of the mirror: until we saw our own faces, in a strange slow dusk, swimming out past a point where we would be taken by the waves and carried under, into a darkness that beat nightlong outside our window. Not once did I outlast the candle's glimmering, to know true blackness, but lay there watching through a blur of lashes, through my own weariness, hearing my sister begin her even rowing toward that other shore, waiting to see what insect or flying creature chance might allow in the room through a crack in the door or a tear in the screen. Watched how they preened themselves in the light, how they tilted toward its center: moth the color of sand, midge or miller hatched out of dust, and about to return, rendered mad now, taking leave of their senses, erratically orbiting, coming in closer, changing the shadows too, casting up their own ghosts, adding to the slow beating carrying me toward sleep-shapes that would be only a pool of wax and grit by morning, smudge of wick, drift of gauzy wing caught like amber. But one of those creatures alone came as though drawn not by flame but by light itself, content to float back and forth above the beds, the sleeping sister, and long ago I heard my father call it by its old Hoosier name, this pale, slow-moving, slow-beating, hushed fly or harmless mosquito that seemed undrawn by fire, and hovered beneath the rafters, or skimmed the walls, as though searching- galleynipper, he called it, that comes in the dead of night, that asks nothing, that is huge and slow and going nowhere except back and forth in the shadows, that will not hurt you, that is too wise to believe in a candle or its dark image guttering, past midnight, in a patched and scaling mirror: galleynipper, that had come for me, that would carry me high above the waves, the sleeping figures adrift, even above the light, and I would know when we had come to the right place.