PLEASE KEEP SOMETHING OUT OF FOUNTAINS

Someone or some group has rubbed or gouged with a sharp or blunt object a critical word from the placard near the fountains. Now no one really knows whom or what to keep out of the fountains. This makes things tricky. It feels very good to fountain. It is very nice to fountain with whatever you want. It is not always nice to fountain with what others want.

So, I hope it’s dogs.

Dogs fountain regularly. They plunge or charge in like hippopotamuses or typhoons and submerge themselves right beside the babies, the shoes, or the floating empties of gin or beer. For all the fondling or coddling they receive, these dogs often suffer from bad skin irritations or infestations of tiny leaping insects. This blights the fountains like a moral or social illness. Or, perhaps it is food products?

This is when Ingrid comes over to discuss the matter. “It’s the literal brink of insanity,” she says, studying the vandalized placard before us. Ingrid is my daughter and flirts openly with exaggeration. She is very intelligent. She is fifteen. She is my only child. She fountains nude.

“Maybe it is nakedness,” I say.

“Or maybe it is institutionalized body bagging.” She is the only person who fountains without clothing. I wear a thong, red cotton. “Anywho,” she says, “I blame Hillary totally.”

She is not alone. Many fountain angry with the Clintons. The Clintons brought us these fountains back in the late ripping nineties, languaged the rules and regulations on a placard, and then suddenly withdrew just as governance seemed at a critical premium. We have all, at one point or another, written a letter to this effect to one or both of the Clintons. These letters have fallen on deafness or preoccupation, it seems. And were the fountains not so nice, generally speaking, a street campaign in Chappaqua might just be on the docket—

O—Perversions! Truly—will the fountaining perversions never stop?

In the meandering canals, the perverts in black sunglasses are ogling my Ingrid from behind, and I must drape a towel over her shoulders. Somehow we have managed to fountain shoulder to shoulder beside these parasites for years without incident. Maybe this was their time. Maybe this was supposed to have been an era without fountain perverts. We may never know now.

But when my Ingrid realizes I’ve toweled her body, she snaps the towel off and drops or dumps it to the cement. “Don’t be crass,” she says, and she runs a few steps, stops, turns, and says, “or archaic.” Then she runs again, her feet slapping until she leaves the ground full eagle—

I lose my breath. Her golden naked body is suspended along a line that parallels the earth. You wonder in moments like this if this is what the fountains are all about. You wonder as you watch your daughter like this if the difference between having less and having nothing is American humanity.