The Leaf That Stayed Dry

The creek had climbed over its own banks and swallowed the path, so Maya and Soren sat on the fat root of a willow and watched brown water slide past their sneakers.

Soren's left boot had a split in the toe. Every time he shifted his foot, cold water pushed in and his sock went heavier. He kept pulling his foot back out of the puddle, and it kept finding a new puddle. That was the kind of day it was.

Maya was not watching the water. She was watching a leaf.

The leaf had blown off the plant behind them, a low silver-green thing with round leaves, and it had landed flat on the surface of the flood. Water pushed at it. Ripples went under it and over it. And the leaf sat there, on top, shining like a coin.

She reached down and pushed it under with one finger.

"Look," she said.

Soren looked. Under the water, the leaf had turned to silver. Not green anymore. A perfect mirror-bright silver, as if someone had dipped it in mercury.

"That's not the leaf color," he said.

"No." She lifted her finger. The leaf popped back up to the surface and rolled itself dry in half a second. Not damp. Dry. She turned it over in her palm. Water did not spread on it. It gathered into fat round beads and rolled straight off the edge, taking the mud with it. The leaf came out of the flood cleaner than it went in.

Soren leaned closer, his cold foot forgotten. He pushed the leaf under himself, slow this time, and held his eye down near the water.

"There's a skin on it," he said. "Underneath. A shiny skin."

"Silver."

"It's air." He said it and then went quiet, checking the words against what his eye was actually seeing. The silver clung to the whole underside of the submerged leaf, and where the silver was, the water was not. The leaf was underwater and it was breathing a thin coat of the world above it. "The silver is air. The water can't touch the leaf. There's a layer of air in the way."

Maya took the leaf back and pushed it deep, all the way down, and let go. It shot up. It broke the surface and flipped onto its back and sat there rocking, and there was not one drop of water on it anywhere.

"How does the air stay?" she asked. "Air comes off things. You wash a spoon, the bubbles leave." She was already pressing her thumb across the leaf's surface, feeling for it. "This is rough. It feels dry-rough. Like dust that won't come off."

"Feel it with your eye," Soren said, which was a Soren thing to say, but she did it. She tipped the leaf against the gray sky.

Up close the leaf was not smooth at all. It was covered in a fur of tiny hairs, so fine they were almost light instead of hair. A forest of them, too small to count.

"The hairs hold the air," Maya said. "The water can't get down between them. It'd have to squeeze past all of them at once and it won't. So it just sits on top of the tips." She pushed the leaf under one more time to check, and the silver leapt back onto the underside exactly where the fur was, and she laughed, delighted, at a leaf. "It carries its own dry."

Soren already had the notebook out of his jacket, the one everyone thought was strange to carry. He drew the leaf. He drew the fur. He drew the silver coat under the water and pressed the pencil hard on the word silver.

Then he stopped drawing and looked at his split boot.

"Maya."

"I know," she said. She was looking at it too.

The boot let water in because water wet the inside of it, spread across it, soaked into the sock, climbed the threads. Water grabbed onto things and pulled itself along. That was the whole problem with water, the whole day's problem, the wet sock and the flooded path and the swallowed trail.

"If the boot were furry like the leaf," Soren said slowly, "water would sit on the tips. It wouldn't come in. It wouldn't even get in through the split, because it couldn't touch the sides of the split."

Maya was somewhere ahead of him now, staring at the flood as if it were a different flood.

"Not just the boot," she said. "The water goes past the leaf like the leaf isn't there. No grip. No drag. Push the leaf, it doesn't stick to anything." She dunstuck it from her own wet palm to prove it, and it fell without a mark. "A boat. If a boat had this fur, the water couldn't hold onto the bottom of it. It'd slide. It'd slide like nothing."

"You couldn't glue it on," Soren said. "You'd have to grow it. Build the fur so small the water can't fit between." He turned his pencil in his fingers. "People must be trying to make this."

"People are definitely trying to make this," Maya said, and there was the recognition, quiet, in her voice. Somewhere, right now, grown people who had never stopped pushing leaves underwater were building fur too small to see, so that ships could carry their own coat of dry across the ocean.

Soren dipped the leaf a last time and held it under with two fingers, and the two of them put their faces close over the brown water to look at the silver skin of trapped air, the thin bright layer that kept the flood on the outside of the leaf where it belonged.

Soren pulled his split boot off, tipped it upside down, and let the creek pour out of it in a long thin rope back into the creek.

Then he set the silver leaf on the surface of the water and pushed it, and it slid away downstream without a ripple sticking to it, spinning, dry, until the current took it around the willow roots and out of sight.