and water, oxygen and hydrogen, sunlight and darkness. What
silent creatures move beneath her swaying feet?
Finally, she floats on her back. The water pulses gently in her
ears, muffling their cheers, turning their volume up and down,
up and down. She thinks: how lucky, that the coldness of this
water is my biggest obstacle today. At fourteen, she imagines
floating here again at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty-eight, at
forty-four, displacing slightly more water each year, helping it
reach incrementally higher on the rocks lining the shore. The
other kids surround her, forming a makeshift flotilla woven of
arms and legs draped over each other’s noodles that’s secretly
approaching the centre of the bay. If she tilted her head back
and opened her eyes, she might see the black sky chasing away
cumulus, rolling towards them. If her ears weren’t submerged,
maybe she would have heard them groaning.
The squall comes, like it’s an arrow and they’re the bullseye.
They have only seconds between the fat drops that splat on their
faces and the torrent that follows, like the clouds have thrown
their hands up in exasperation. The curtain of rain is a slow
shutter. In the still-frames Shelby sees: her parents (Dad’s red
swim trunks; Mom in a white towel dress) beckoning from the
edge of the dock, Tilly’s delighted smile that soon sputters, the
lake transforming into a giant drum, puckering as it begrudgingly
accepts the raindrops, the red ribbon of a too-close speedboat
making waves salute the sky. Beneath the vibrating hide: an eerie
muteness, tangled yellowed limbs stirring in slow motion. Shelby
cannot decipher between the kneecaps, the toes, except for Tilly’s,
whose distinctly shorter limbs reach for the lake’s floor.
She is lost, the doctor tells Shelby. He filled his mouth with those
three words while he waited for her to wake fully, until they felt
edible. It explains why her parents are still at the lake, not at her
bedside holding her hand. They’re paltry syllables, but it’s >>