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the flies.
    Augustine and I left the market and wandered down the hill toward the harbor, drawn by the coolness blowing off the sea. The streets had emptied out, people gone home for the midday meal and to wait out the worst of the heat, and so it seemed the city was all our own, a kind of private kingdom and we its rulers. Augustine carried my basket and we walked side by side, close but not touching, the space between us not so much a void than a drawing in of breath before words are spoken. He told me Nebridius had been called away to deal with a land dispute on one of his family’s farms a day’s ride outside Carthage and would not be back until the next day. I glanced at him, surprised, for I knew Augustine had many other friends, patricians’ sons like himself, who spent the afternoons drinking in the local wine bars near the forum.
    â€œWatch your step,” he said as I stumbled on an uneven paving stone, and when he put his hand out to steady me it burned.
    The harbor was quiet, the sun refracting off the stone piers dazzling to the eye, blistering to the touch. The boats tied up against the jetties creaked on the slight swell, the slap of water against their hulls clearly audible, the occasional flapping of a rope a strangely peaceful percussion. In the taverns and bars that lined the quay, sailors and stevedores huddled on benches under faded awnings stretched on poles, elbows on the tables, beakers clutched in their hands, their eyes even at rest turned toward the sea.
    With the coppers I saved on the fish, we bought olives and goat cheese wrapped in grape leaves and begged a clay jar from a stall owner which we filled from a fountain and swore to return. The girl smiled at Augustine and tossed her head so her earrings shimmered. She was small and pretty, her eyes outlined with charcoal like a cat’s.
    â€œPromise?” she said.
    â€œOn my honor,” Augustine replied. She giggled and when we walked away I looked back over my shoulder and saw her watching us with her cat’s eyes.

    In search of shade we found a boat half-upturned on the beach and sat beneath it, our knees drawn up, the basket and the earthen jar between us. I took off my sandals and dabbled my toes in a tiny rock pool not yet drunk up by the thirsty sun. Lifting my face to the wind blowing off the ocean, I closed my eyes and when I opened them Augustine was looking at me.
    â€œHere,” he said, handing me the water jar.
    I drank and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
    â€œNow you,” I said.
    He drank and then placed the jar deep in the shade behind us to keep cool. We were silent looking out at the sea as we had done the first day we met. It was like being on the edge of the world.
    â€œTell me everything,” Augustine said.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œAbout you.”
    And so I did, beginning with my childhood as far back as I could remember, about my father and his craft, what he taught me, how much he loved me and I him. My voice faltered then and I fell quiet.
    â€œWhat are you thinking?” Augustine asked after a time.
    I turned to look at him. “I chose that fish at the market because it looked like one my father once made. Each silver scale, the red line along the gills, all exactly the same. But the colors he used were not silver and red at all. He chose white and gray and yellow and black. I remember thinking: Those colors are all wrong; they will never work.” I laughed. “But then it did,” I said. “Work, I mean. It was completely right. When you stepped back and saw it from a distance, it was alive .” An unexpected delight, the same as when I touched the miracle of that perfect fish with a child’s finger to see if it would move, flamed up in me, and for a brief instant I saw my father walking toward me on the beach, his tablet of sketches looped through his belt bumping rhythmically against his hip.
    â€œYou are your father’s