The Light in August

By Andrew Bertaina

The light in August, she says, and suddenly, I notice it, the summer passing again, which has never fulfilled its promise, which is something summer and I have in common, I can hear my father saying to me from the front seat of the car where he’s driving across the bridge past San Quentin prison, which he always used to tell me I’d wind up in someday, and I don’t miss then, the summers of my childhood much either, if I think of it enough. But I can’t help but remember the clean light of mid-July, swallows darting through the trees, lifting a small fence board we’d lifted from an old patch of ivy, showing the kids how to swing just like Will Clark, turning my left shoulder until it was nested up against my chin, then smashing the tennis ball in a long arc, way out over the trees and over the swallows, and into the fields beyond, which were empty then in that summer I sometimes still yearn for, or really, just that moment, the tennis ball soaring through the clean light, mid-summer, all of life ahead of me.

About the Author

Andrew Bertaina is the author of the forthcoming essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus Books), and the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award.  His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. He is currently teaching undergraduate creative writing at American University.