The boards under you are warm where the sun has been on them all afternoon, cooler where your shadow falls. You sit with your knees drawn up a little, your feet hanging over the edge of the jetty, the soles of your shoes a hand's width above the rowboat tied below. The boat is dark green, paint flaking along the gunwale to show the older red beneath, and older grey beneath that. A length of frayed rope loops twice around a bollard at your hip and ties off in a slack knot. The water beyond the boat is brown, the colour of weak tea, and moves so slowly that it seems mostly to be thinking about moving.
A dragonfly comes from somewhere along the bank, low and direct, and stops in the air above the rowboat's bow. It hangs there. Its wings are not visible as wings but as a faint disturbance, like heat over a road. Then it sets down on the wooden seat in the middle of the boat, folds itself into a thin blue line, and is still. After a moment it lifts again without ceremony and moves out over the water, dropping and rising in the small invisible ladders that dragonflies use, and turns along the reeds and is lost in them. The seat where it sat shows a faint mark of damp, a dark print no larger than a thumbnail, which the sun begins to draw upward into the air.
You let your eyes follow the rope from the bollard down to the bow ring. The rope is grey-brown, three strands twisted together, soft from long wetting and drying. Where it passes through the iron ring it has worn the iron smooth on the inside curve, and the iron has worn the rope shiny in the same place. A small black beetle is making its way along the top of the bollard, climbing the splinters as if they were a range of hills. It reaches the lip, considers the drop, turns, and goes back the way it came. Somewhere under the jetty the water makes a low knocking sound against a post, a soft repeating thud, and then a pause, and then the thud again, the rhythm of nothing in particular passing through.
The wood of the jetty is oak, you think, or something close to it, planks laid lengthways and pegged with dark iron nails that have wept rust into the grain in long thin streaks. The streaks run with the wood. Between two of the planks a tuft of moss has taken hold, no wider than a coin, and a single thread of spider silk lifts from it and catches the light and goes invisible again as the angle changes. You put your palm flat on the board beside you. The warmth comes up through your hand slowly, the way warmth comes out of a stone that has been in the sun. Under your palm there is a long shallow groove worn into the wood, smoothed by years of boots and ropes and the bottoms of fish-baskets, the kind of hollow that water finds first when it rains.
From the far bank, where the alders lean out, comes the call of a moorhen, a single sharp note and then nothing. The reeds there are pale green at the tips and darker lower down, and they move when no wind seems to be moving them, a slow shuffling that travels along the bank in patches. A pair of pondskaters work the slack water in the lee of the boat, leaving dimples that drift and join and come apart. The smell coming off the water is not unpleasant — green, faintly muddy, with something of cut grass in it from the meadow behind you, and under that the cooler smell of old wood that has been wet for a long time and is, this afternoon, dry. The varnish on the boat's transom has crazed into a thousand small islands, and each island holds its own patch of dust.
A kingfisher comes through. There is no warning. It passes the length of the jetty about a foot above the water, blue along its back so intense that it leaves an afterimage in the eye, orange beneath that you catch only as it banks at the reedbed, and it is gone into the alders before the sound of it reaches you, which is no sound at all, only a thin disturbance of air. You sit a moment looking at the place where it was. The brown water moves on. A leaf — a willow leaf, narrow and yellowing at the edges — comes down from somewhere upstream and rides the surface past the bow of the rowboat, turning slowly, and goes on, and a second leaf follows it some way behind. The dragonfly, or another like it, returns and resumes its station above the boat. It hangs, drops a hand's breadth, hangs again.
You shift your weight and the jetty gives the smallest of creaks beneath you, a sound that seems to come from further down than where you sit, from one of the posts driven into the riverbed years ago by people you will never know about. The boat rocks. The rope tightens against the bollard, slack goes out of it, then slack returns, and the boat settles back. A few flakes of green paint detach from the inside of the hull and float for a while on the inch of water that lies in the bilge, water the colour of the river but stiller, holding a single feather and a length of waterlogged twine and a dried husk of something that was once a seed. The oars are shipped along the thwarts, their blades stained darker at the tips. The leather collars on the looms are soft with use, the brass of the rowlocks dulled to the colour of an old coin.
The light is beginning its slow lean toward the west. The shadow of the jetty has reached further across the water than it did when you sat down, and the surface beyond the shadow has gone from brown to a brown shot through with gold, broken here and there where a fish rises and the rings widen and meet the bank and come back as smaller rings. A swallow cuts low across the open water, takes something invisible, climbs, and is replaced by another swallow taking the same line a moment later. The air is cooler against the back of your neck than it was. From the meadow, a cow lows once, far off, the sound carrying flat across the grass. Somewhere in the reeds a warbler is going through a long quiet phrase of its own, the notes running into each other like water over small stones.
You look down again at the rowboat. The dragonfly has gone. A small ripple moves along the side of the hull and the boat answers it with a slow lift and settle, the rope tightening and slackening, the bollard taking the strain and giving it back. The knocking under the jetty has slowed, or perhaps your hearing of it has slowed. The brown water carries another leaf past, and another. A midge or two come up out of the shadow beneath you and drift higher, catching the light as flecks of brightness above the boat. The wood under your palm has cooled a degree. The streaks of rust in the planks look darker now, and the moss between them seems greener, as if the failing of the light were lending things back to themselves a little.
Across the water the alders have gone from green to a deeper green, almost blue at their roots where the bank steepens and the shadow gathers. The reeds along the near side have lost their tips to the shade and stand quieter. The rowboat lifts, settles, lifts, settles. The rope at your hip is the colour of wet stone now. A last swallow goes over, lower than the others, and the rings of a rising fish open beyond the bow and travel outward without hurry until they reach the hull and become a slow tilt of the boat and a small sound of water touching paint. The dragonfly does not come back. The kingfisher does not come back. The light on the water thins and goes on thinning, and the brown river carries its leaves around the bend and out of sight, and the jetty holds its warmth a while longer in the grain of the boards, and the boat at its rope keeps its small slow time below