Steam

My father did thirty years at the furnaces in Vítkovice, and what he says about it, if you ask, is the heat, and then the thirst, how you drank by the litre and never once had to go, it all came out through your shirt, and the shirt stood up by itself at the end of a shift, white at the collar, a map of salt where the sea in you had been.

My sister went north, to Luleå, to a plant that makes iron the new way, no coke, no coal, just ore and hydrogen and enough heat, and when she came home at Christmas she showed him a photo of the stack, and he said where's the smoke, and she said there isn't any, it's water. The iron gives its oxygen to the hydrogen, and that's what comes off. Steam, Dad. That's the whole exhaust.

He didn't believe her, then he did, then he got quiet the way he does when a thing turns out to have been simpler than his life.

I read this week the Earth might have done the same before it was the Earth, dry pebbles falling through hot hydrogen, giving up their iron, the metal going down to be the core, the oxygen going up married to hydrogen older than any star, and coming off as water, far too much of it, a hundred seas, and most of it lost to space, and what was left was heavier for the losing, the way the salt is what's left on a shirt, and that's how you can tell where it's been.

So the sea might be the planet's sweat, I told him, from making its own iron. He thought about that over the cabbage. Then he said well, no wonder it's salty, and laughed, and my sister said Dad, that isn't why, and he said I know, I know, I was there, and held his glass up to the window like a man checking a weld.