October Flash Fiction #8 - I Know What You Did Last Summer

“…fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him… yet none of these many tales got written down:  they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her.” Lewis Carroll, “Alice on the Stage,” quoted in The Annotated Alice, footnote 1, page 7.

Kendra thought of Ratty and Mole as she stepped into the rubber raft.  She felt like a raft within a raft with the orange life preserver around her neck.  Maya was already sitting astride the far side of the raft and her dad sat at the back where he could keep an eye on both of them and steer.  Already there was cold river water sloshing across the thin rubber bottom.  It startled Kendra when it seeped into her left Ked and turned it a dark muddy gray.  The right Ked, more in charge of its fate, chose the moment it dipped into the river, but Kendra’s leg came out in goosepimples anyway.

The raft monitor, sullen, pimple-faced, probably really old, like almost twenty, handed out paddles that had orange blades like especially colorful duck feet, if ducks happened to have blue plastic legs.  The woman with the blond ponytail snapped a picture as soon as they pushed away from the dock, catching Kendra with her hair blowing across her face, Maya’s head thrown back in a laugh, and her dad already thinking about lunch.

Other rafters, some with coolers of beer, some with squirt guns, bobbed along with them.  Kendra paddled.  The sun warmed her back and glinted on the ripples, making her think of fish and fairies, but the current carried them along before the story even unfolded in her mind, replaced by whatever creatures might emerge from the granite boulders along the shore.

The cousins of those boulders sometimes popped up in the stream itself, frothing the water.  Maya cackled with glee when the river spun them around and they crashed backward into a cluster of rocks.  Her father prodded them free and they spun more, all of them wet with the spray.

In the deeper places, the river loitered and Kendra looked far down at a bed of pebbles.  The pines on the bank dropped needles and the occasional spider.

The last stretch of the river before the landing churned.  They went through most of it sideways to the current, rocks sliding beneath their feet.  Kendra scraped her shin on one when they got stuck a moment.  Tears welled up, but no one could tell because of the cast-off droplets from the paddles.

The next week when school started with the obligatory essay, Kendra wrote about the rafts, but not about that night when Maya’s dad came in to the room where she was sleeping and the rubbery feeling between her legs.  She didn’t like messing about in boats after all.