Some time not long after the war had started, after the demonstrators had demonstrated and then gone home (their cardboard protest signs in the recycling bins), and after the manufacturing boom in Taiwanese-made American flags and Chinese-made American flag t-shirts and Mexican-made American car flags and car flagpoles and Malaysian-made Made in America pendants, you found yourself on the coast lacquered with 30 SPF and patting your hair down, over that bald spot, and pulling your shorts up to your belly button, over that embarrassing albino bulge.

Kite-flying looked like fun, rather relaxing even. You turned to the person next to you—a lover, perhaps, or a spouse that you remembered once loving—and said: “I think it’s the sound I like best.”

You meant that one kite there, wanting to dive, to dive, to dive for the sand—rippling, wind-torn, angry almost.