Last Call

At Water’s Edge Restaurant, you tell me the menu hasn’t changed but the portions look smaller than 
when you were a girl. You point to the railing where your brother used to slide down like a charging 
bull. He’s still a bull. You scan the specialty cocktails list at 11AM on a Tuesday because this is it 
before Greenville: there in a laboratory our hopefully future family is frozen—suspended in 
possibility by a science I don’t really want to understand so long as it works. You order something 
with tequila and I do the same but there’s no relaxing: The high chair can’t contain our only success 
story. He’s too damn big and boats are calling his name. I take him out to the boardwalk and follow 
the long line of vessels with clever names like Knot So Fast and Unsinkable II. Some are pristine, 
others scarred. Some large and luxurious, others small and subsistent. Our only success story makes 
a break for it and I hustle to reel him in, still afraid he will vanish into the ether from which he came. 
I hoist him up on my shoulders like a sail and set course for the table where our fried seafood has 
surely arrived. You are a speck from this distance, yet infinitely bigger than a frozen possibility. The 
sky darkens over Shem Creek and I’m wondering, as I sometimes do when the weather turns, how 
any of us ever survived the impossible journey to being.

ISAAC RANKIN

Isaac Rankin lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He works at an all-boys boarding school, Christ School, where he serves as associate director of advancement. His poems and short stories have appeared or will soon appear in the Chaffin Journal, Potomac Review, TAB Journal, The William & Mary Review, and other places.