'Fluid Dynamics' by Anne Daly

Our daughter doesn’t like the swimming pool. She is a storm cloud, heavy with rain, wriggling in your arms as you try to soothe her. You whisper the principles of buoyancy into her outraged ear, how Archimedes jumped into a bath and discovered buoyant force. Her face is a puddle, dancing with raindrops. Her tiny, curled fists, budding branches that sway against your chest.

Time flows backwards to the night that you walked me home. Streetlamps swirled prisms through a haze of rain above out heads. We eddied across the heavy stone of the bridge and leaned over to watch the river.  You spoke of turbulence and velocity, how the water dips and chases itself as it flows beneath the arch.  It is held there in a moment of brief compression, a coiled stasis that flowers with accelerated force when it comes out the other side. Your smile was an arc of freshwater and though we hadn’t said it yet, I knew that I loved you then.

You dandle her feet in the water, the tears dissipate into a smile. She looks with interest at her toes as the liquid displaces around the shape of her. You hold her gently under her arms and I watch her become the river. A brackish current wearing a pink bathing suit, in search of equilibrium as she races towards the sea.