Wednesday (Fiction) Story Tellin'

The Canoe

If I remember correctly this is how it went:

I emerged from the screen door of your childhood home to find you rummaging through the shed. If we stood facing the ocean, the sun was dipping down behind us into rippling storm clouds that resembled enormous fish scales lapping over one another. You came out of the dusty shed twice to catch a breath of fresh air. No one had used the canoe in years, you said. Your father had trapped it under excess lumber and collected metal scraps. You were optimistic. I was calculating the barometric pressure. 

Mice and spiders had since filled into the unoccupied spaces of the shed. (Was that the shed where you said you experienced your first kiss in 7th grade?) The spiders were not ready to be torn away so easily from their well established home so you stood for a minute pulling cobwebs out of your hair. I helped you. It was your blonde-curls, after all, I had loved first. 

In truth I was stalling, secretly hoping you would not unearth the canoe. The sky was darkening. Images of us sitting in the middle of the pond in your canoe with lightning around us made me do what I did best: I began writing my own medical chart. Could lightning really fry your bones and if so, what would be the Latin translation? 

But you had another image and things may have been different if I had only known what it meant to you. The sky was almost as dark as midnight that afternoon when you came out of the shed, trying to tug the canoe behind you. It became stuck on something just as you were almost out the door. I imagined a hundred thousand delicate spider webs attached to the unseen end. The spiders were pulling back and there you stood, yanking and starting to sweat from the labor. You may have wondered why I didn't help you. I suppose I may have seemed unreasonable. But there was thunder somewhere in the distance. 

I let you pull the canoe down the gravel driveway and into the reeds that swayed next to a soft, spongy edge of the pond. (Didn't you have a neighbor our age who was allergic to grass? Did she still live in the pink house on the cliff? You had said she was never able to leave her house because of her allergy. Can you imagine? you had asked me.) The ocean was just a couple hundred yards away from where we stood. You were so right. It would have been beautiful to sit there on the pond with you that afternoon. You turned to me with one foot propped in the canoe and one arm extended toward me, childlike and excited. You were another person. Almost unrecognizable from the serious personality you carried in the midwestern climate. All I had to do was take your hand. You would have taken care of everything.

But I couldn't. There was a wind moving around me reminiscent of the tornado of 1991 and I was certain I felt my ears change pressure. I stood there sinking into the soft edge of the pond, my feet only digging in further and further as your facial expressions moved from childlike to rejected to frustration to anger. I could only shake my head. I may have started to cry. I was't trying to be defiant. (Did the girl you kissed by the shed- would she have gotten into the canoe despite the approaching storm?) You didn't seem to see the lightning. I suppose all you saw was me. For that I should have been grateful.  Instead I continued to sink down into the earth while I watched you drag the canoe back up the driveway.