Fourth Wall

A table pushed against the wall below a window that opens to the river below the house.

The river, the fourth member in our dinner party, joins the conversation in a rush. 

Her voice is lush and opulent, an audible rush over smooth stones.  She is my longtime companion.

“Do you like the silver highlights in my hair?” asks the river. Unbelievable!

Do I break down the fourth wall and ask, “What is this construct about anyway? Will the heart play a role, or the soul a part?”

Instead, I focus on the family members at the table, my wife and daughter, and turn the conversation to the sea-lion caves, my chance to see them now lost though I remember the oversized bumper stickers and sticker is the wrong word because there was no adhesive and you wired them to your bumper which was of chrome and separate from the chassis, coupled in two places. 

This ad for the sea lion caves was on every other car on the coast highway in year 19 mumble gurgle and yet my parents drove on by, drove on by.

I ask the river: “Do you have an opinion on sea lions, or caves, or the riverbank that was here before the house, or an opinion regarding the house’s foundation that is made from river stones stacked one atop the other and will remain long after the house collapses, in some post-apocalyptic era?”

“Shut up and watch me,” commands the river.

I had a second chance to see those sea lion caves when my daughter who sits across the table from me, close to my heart, was younger and the right age for sea lions

“That chance, it’s gone,” I say, “like a kayak, fleet in your current, river!”

Panic stricken, I turn away from the river to my wife who is to my left at the table and is of course my soul mate and say to her:

“I had those two chances and now they’re gone. We’re lost,” like a fleet of kayaks in the ocean, tilted by the tides, pursuing the migrating sea lions north to the Channel Islands, beyond the horizon, through the fourth wall, “lost.”