The serious one shone blue. The muscular goof wore his red. The sole of my boot tapped the wooden decking in time with bass string thumpings left by my thumb. Their eyes fell, heavy—the goof going so far as to roll on his side and dream. The serious one never napped so deeply. He always kept one eye on me, always one floppy ear reaching out. I worked through the old songs, singing to those on the winds, for those are the only folk my music struck anymore. The last chord faded. I came back. That floppy ear twitched and his eyes bore me again. I hadn’t moved. I wondered how he knew that I needed to leave. Maybe it was the sound of my breath falling from my chest in some certain way. He awoke and rose as I did.  The goof clambered up after us, his heavy bones still sleeping. We walked together under the pines that hung over the ocean, they always a little ahead, me always a little behind. We cut back towards the canyon. An ambulance screamed by on the bridge forty feet over our heads, its sirens blaring down the concrete supports, ringing out towards the sea. They thought it was a ghost, some ancestor calling out to them. They howled high until they found their voices. The serious one howled deeper then; he held it until he was sure he was the last to say goodbye, and then he listened. The forest was silent. The highway above us must have been empty. I watched as they listened with their eyes on nothing, their ears flicking about for change. The serious one licked his chops and trotted on his merry way. It wasn’t long before trickles of rushing water fell on our ears and the goof tore off, rounding the corner and disappearing out of sight. We found him shoulder-deep, ducking his head. He stared up at me like a child mid-heist in a cookie jar, his tongue lolling off to one side. I clicked my tongue twice and off they went, charging ahead of me deeper into the valley, the redwoods growing taller with every passing mile. They didn’t seem to notice, but maybe they did. Who am I to say.

He wanted to say goodbye. He wasn’t there yet, wasn’t to the point where it was fine to sit and drink with them. Something in his heart scolded him for sitting. You’re a failure, it said, and a fool, and nothing in your life bears evidence of your right to sit amongst them. I know, he said back, but it’s nice for a while. He marveled at the diamonds of light in the blowing canopy, the warm tones at the death of day. Someday, when he died—maybe in the place they all spoke of—he could smile and laugh with the virility he never could here, with the honesty he could never muster. In the back of his mind he heard them: There were mountains calling, cold nights beckoning, stories to live and strangers to meet. He was not he, not yet. He was a sad impostor, a poor diddling child. He figured they saw it too. It was the way he sat, the way he wore his clothes, never quite comfortable, his weight constantly shifting from one hip to the other. He hadn’t fought enough, hadn’t torn his destiny from the stars. He saw them, was left dumbstruck in the light of their cold fire—one day, he knew, they’d be old friends. But for now, he was some sloppy fraud who played nice. His edge was blunted, his mind assuming, his heart unfinished. Soon, he said, soon I’ll go. I’ll go far off into the desert; into foreign cities. I’ll mouth exotic words, trade striking eyes with complex women, and share bread with men who see me as I’m supposed to be: far from home. And, as long as I keep to that, as long as I stay away, they’ll be proud and I’ll stride naturally and my eyes will shine again. Soon, he whispered, but time was running out. 

Songbirds sang in the wild garden below. Vultures rode the currents above. Plumes of white amongst the blue told her the whales were still traveling. She wished for them above all other animals. “Godspeed,” she said, warming her nose in the rising steam of her coffee mug. He was gone now, scattered in these very winds, or some sea wind like them, just off the point there. She remembered that she wept. And she remembered that she knelt there for a very long time. The Sun drifted from view and the sea wore the last of its light. A noise drove her eyes from the pine-needled ground. Rushes of air, whale plumes, twenty or thirty—she couldn’t count them all—rose at the base of the cliffs. She remembers the vapor wetting her cheeks, but she tells herself it was only her tears. She remembers the cries of the whales, as though they mourned with her, but no, she thinks again, just another figment of her imagination. But that feeling was true: that feeling she had as she wept on her knees, her world tossed to the winds, the sun low and the waters on fire—that feeling the whales gave her—as though a congregate of the most holy souls prayed with her in language unknown. We are with you, they said, and he is with us. I could not construct that, she thought. And she smiles over her coffee to see them swim on. And she knows, in the pit of her gut, that they are the heart of the world as it is meant to be. And she prays for them. 

They say you will be here any day now. My shoes churn the gravel but I do not move; it’s the world turning beneath me. My nights are spent in dreaming frenzies, the sheets torn from my side of the bed. At least I sleep. Your mother does not fare better. You guys keep her up all hours of the night, pushing and punching and kicking her insides. I wake up hearing my heart drum-rolling against my sternum, while she’s in the bathroom for the fortieth time tonight. We say we’re ready. We say we’re not. But you’re on your way, I can feel it. I hope you two have some of this figured out. I can tell you in all confidence that nothing went according to plan. I was going to be accomplished, rich even, and skinnier to boot. There was supposed to be one of you, for one thing. I guess that’s the one thing that did go to plan. I wanted you. I knew it. I knew that despite the logistics and anxieties, I wanted you with every cell in my body. It was the same way when I decided I wanted to marry your mother. And now with the two of you coming, I’m suspicious of how lucky I am. It feels predestined. The two of you changing our world. And the fear evaporates, gone in an instant, whenever I picture the two of you here, finally, with us. Yesterday, the technician measured your belly, Benji, and in that moment I imagined the two of you squirming around on our bed. I thought of what it would be to pick each of you up, to kiss your bellies. It’s hard to describe. It feels warm. It feels purposeful. They say you will be here any day now, and I am the most eager one in the world to meet you both. I don’t know what we’re going to tell the dogs. You’ll have to win them over.