Sole mate, hat mate, it fits.

Hat Trick
By: Jennifer Michael Hecht

A woman howling, her baby's bunk somehow afloat in the river, taking on water. Help, shrieks the mother. Shriek, helps the baby, and a good man jumps into the river; splash and paddle. Grabs the kid, hands the damp bundle over. Thank God, cries the mother. She cradles her daughter, looks up at the man, says, Excuse me, but she had a hat.The child grows up to be a hat-check girl, always trying to get back what she'd lost,always having to return it all by the end of thenight. She is often sorrowful and ashamedfor being sorrowful, surrounded by warm coats, a stool to rest on while others,elsewhere, spend all day bending. Wincinganyway, she sharp regrets her bland missteps, laments her ill use and fatigue. It is awful: her feet hot with it, her head metal-cold.You think it's enough to just keep getting old? Can't I also have my hat?Roots squeeze this information toward their leaves: You can not also have your hat.After mother and child left, the man, loitering the scene of his heroicshappened upon the little girl's small cap.Picked it up off the bank, startled by the tinyscale of its protection, took it home, kept it for years, then lost track of it.It's been long seasons since he'd jump in the sea like a fin in response to a splash.To be so little thanked, so asked for more, flattened in him what he hoped he had to give.The mother grows less certain by degreesthat all that she had long awaitedhad any sense outside the confinesof her blazing expectations.The girl, fidgeting hairclip in cloak room, her own self set by his one leap and her many lurid resignations, braces waves of distress and lets down her tresses. All three rail
their separate saga, he having labored and netted so little; the elder she having
wanted so much from those around her and found she was not so much let downas wrong in her detailed attentions; the girlwrestling a dreadful shadow: the factsthat throw us in the water in the first placeruin us for much saving. She is aggrievedof it, feels disgraced by the triumph of pain. I want to comfort them, myself, my keen regret,but am at best a lemon tree, vivid fruitabundant among bleak green leaves. I will wait for ice and sugar to be invented, bees in the daytime, bats when it's done. I will wait in the sun. I hope for relief like a lunatic, indulge, like a drunk, in my croon. It is my intention to offer lemonade while there is time and so much brutal sunshine. Meanwhile, I can't do much, but gather the hero and the mother beneath my bower.
As for the girl, she's not a hat-checker, anymore, there's no such thing these
days. After an eon of servitude: menstopped wearing hats, so she was freeto wander away from the 21 Cluband under my branches. Isn't shebeautiful? Didn't she have a hat? To know, and arrange, and recover even that. I am ridiculous, but it is what is wanted.


I think it's just lovely, don't you?!