by Molly Weisgrau

 

You know the summer that The Thing happened at camp? I was eleven and you were eleven and every night was glitter fingernails gooey marshmallow Freddy strum strum strumming Amazing Grace. Firelight glow on our eyeballs. All of us girls and boys too looking right through Freddy’s white tank top, so thin it was tissue paper it was gift wrap it was nothing at all. Voice so slick we jammed our toes into the dirt but still he would slide over your skin like silt.

One night, fifth night, quiet quiet, he said he saw me by the lake. You’d swam beside me all day and then, in my brother’s old cutoffs on our tie dye towels, hair glued down by the greenwater we guzzled PB&Js with lemonade. You swatted a mosquito drinking from my cheek. We laughed till our ribs ached. I thought he knew we were mermaids but no. Pretty, he said. Pretty face pretty neck pretty shoulders pretty pretty pretty pretty ankles pretty feet. Needle chin rough on my earlobe.

Then the thirteenth day, last day. Big vinyl rafts zipping through the white rumble. Round helmets giving us all ping pong ball heads. Every churning drop he was bumping my pretty pretty pretty pretty. River foam my only witness. This is the confession part. I did it on purpose. I looked to the sky and let go of the handle and my body glooped off like jelly from a knife.

Water burns when it’s all the way up your nose. I reached reached reached toward the sunshimmer. Then that tank top, thin as a Bible page. Two wooden arms hauling me up and out. Still reaching.

Mom cried on the phone and thanked Him for bringing me back to breath. I trembled so hard in bed that night that you burritoed me with your flannel blanket.

Do you think he knew I wasn’t drowning, I was praying? Do you think he knew I never wanted to be saved?

 

Molly Weisgrau is a writer from Lawrence, Kansas. She has an MFA from  Oregon State University and was managing editor of 45th Parallel Literary Magazine. Her work appears in Hobart, Ghost Parachute,  Fractured Lit, Waif Magazine, and elsewhere. She currently writes from a  church basement in Chicago. Read more at mollyweisgrau.com.