Page 83 of Wayfarers

“Yoda milk?!”

“What?”

“First of all, I’m surprised you’ve seen Star Wars.”

I shrug. “Well. I was little.”

“Secondly . . . I don’t know where to start. Okay, we see no evidence in any of the Star Warses that Yodas even produce milk.”

“I haven’t seen them all. But I believe you.”

“Like, they live in a swamp and have croaky voices. They’re frog people basically.”

“The way the Avatar guys are cat people?”

“Exactly. And frogs famously do not produce milk.”

“No, for sure.”

“But even if they did, there’s no reason it would be green. Like brown cows do not produce brown milk.” Sylvie looks at me. “Don’t look at me skeptically. Didn’t you say you’d milked a goat before?”

“I didn’t say that but I have.”

“There you go. And was the milk goat-colored?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?!”

“It was a white goat.”

“I hate you.”

“Wanna know what I’ve done in addition to milking goats?”

“Not sure I do wanna know.” Sylvie ducks under the water and comes back up, smoothing her hair back and wiping droplets from her eyes.

“Picked avocados. Like for a job.”

Sylvie slaps my chest. “Stop.”

I’m fairly sure she could have just said stop without touching my chest and I like that she seized upon the excuse. “In California, for a season.”

“What was that like?”

I shrug. “Paid okay. Kinda fun sometimes. We’d go up in a basket in this cherry picker–type thing and handpick them. You had to be really careful.”

“You’ve had a pretty interesting life, haven’t you.” The sun shines in Sylvie’s face and her eyes catch the light and luminesce like prisms.

I look away from her, out over the lake toward the horizon, feeling wistful suddenly. “In some ways.”

Knox It Occurs to Me

In this moment it occurs to me

that she might be saying

she wishes she knew