Small sailboat on the collarbone

Their father had been a ferryman on a lake that dried up the year Nell turned nine. He took the family's little dinghy out onto the cracked mud one last time, rigged the sail, and laughed at the neighbours who stood at the edge with their arms folded. Afterwards Nell found a drawing he'd made on the back of a seed packet: one sail, a hull like a folded leaf, nothing else. She still kept it in the glovebox, under the map.

The boat came nearer, or the road did. The sail resolved into a sheet of corrugated tin propped on two oil drums, flapping in a wind that never reached the cab. Beside it a man in a straw hat sat on a kitchen chair, waiting for a bus that had stopped running before either of them was born. He lifted a hand. Nell lifted hers. Ivo asked if they should stop.

'No,' she said. 'He's got his boat. Let him wait for the lake.'

In the mirror the shimmer closed behind them like water over a dropped stone, and the tin sail stayed upright on the empty road, a small dark mark on the horizon that Nell did not look back to see disappear.