WATER

(published in Potomac Review, Issue 37)

It must be three a.m. by the time I take Echo Lake Exit and find the gravel road that leads to the resort. The headlights of my Subaru tunnel through the dark and highlight dusty tangled gooseberries and tall grass beside the road, but miss the shadowed potholes. I hit one good and my tackle box in the back skitters across the seat and dumps itself, upside down, on the floor. I’d been easing off the gas, anyway, for the last few miles. Rolling down the window, I stick my arm out, and let the cool air run through my fingers. I can smell the lake. Crickets give the dark a rasping pulse, punctuated by croaking bullfrogs and the pyrotechnics of fireflies.

The high beams of the headlights unwrap curve after curve in the road. It finally straightens out and a big ramshackle white residence lights up in relief against a black sky. “Felson’s Bait and Tackle,” the sign says. But I don’t have to read it to know what it says. For as far back as I can remember my extended family spent summers here mixing it up with the other renters, as well as the proprietors–all of us one big happy family. Until my sixteenth summer, that is, when everything changed. EVERYTHING.

The windows are dark in the upper story where Felson, the proprietor, and his daughter, live. Not much seems changed in the five years since I’ve been here. At least on the outside. I think of Felson, inside, and the news my Dad passed along to me about him. If it weren’t for Felson, I wouldn’t be here, no question. But the U. was over for the semester and I wasn’t tied up in a summer job yet; in other words, I didn’t have a good excuse. Besides, Felson had requested that we come.

A couple of docks are lit at the marina a little farther down the road. Fishing boats rock gently in the water and bump up against each other companionably. Scattered down the length of a peninsula is a row of white clapboard cabins. I pass my Aunt Lissie’s and Uncle Caps’, their Buick parked alongside. At the next one I pull in behind my parent’s Volvo. The crunch of the gravel under foot as I get my gear from the back seat seems deafening in the stillness. Trees as much as whisper over my head….”shhhh”. Even at this hour there’s actually a sliver of light left on the western horizon.

“Landon? Is that you?”

The rest can be found in Potomac Review’s Issue 37.  http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/potomacreview/