Once Upon a Scummy Pond

A skinny black girl, her torso submerged, long neck holding her head up like a swimming Anhinga. I should not know what a ‘snakebird’ is --- I am eleven years old and have lived in the same dirty part of London all my life. Florida is a missing piece in a school jigsaw, while the British Empire is a scummy quarry basin pond behind a brick factory. My body feels rasped by cosmic sluice gates. I could tell the girl wonderful things, but my skull is an open hatch jettisoning the rest of my life. Small boys call to me in a trilling tongue, a pictorial language made from sticks and stones. Their faces familiar but their names long drowned by decades. I am recalling, falling through a time circle in a rippling pond. Anhinga-girl circles around, eyes wide, waiting for me to say something. I don't know how to speak to children from other places. I gulp water and splutter from a faraway memory. She grins and frog-legs away.