FLASH FICTION WEEK 2025
Runner-up
BY LARRY BROWN
Copyright is held by the author.
THE SKY sprays sunlight. I sit on a blanket, eating a cheese sandwich. First time I have been out of the lake since we arrived at Port Darling an hour ago. My parents sit facing straight ahead in their folding chairs, sort of like strangers on a bus. Two weeks and three days and I’ll be 13, clearly and cleanly a teenager.
My father stands up.
OK, he says.
My mother takes a slow drink from her chipped but unbreakable cup. Her Hollywood sunglasses black out her eyes.
Ready to part the waters are we, she says.
My father shrugs off his shirt. He wears trunks, not a bathing suit. Don’t try telling him any differently. The sun has darkened his arms up to the elbows like a pair of long gloves. Then pasty white takes over, wiry hairs here and there.
I get up from the blanket.
Stay here, eat, my father says.
He gives me a look. One that sags at the edges. One that makes me turn away, look for my mother.
There is a sandbar today and as my father wades farther out the water remains at his knees.
Wake me when you get back, I hear my mother say. She comments for her own ears a lot more lately.
The water climbs higher on him, the sandbar done. He looks one way, then the other, as if checking for traffic. He faces away from the beach, arms flat to his sides, almost at attention.
Then my father, all of him, slips down into the water.
The sun stares hard at me. I can kind of hear it buzz.
Where, says my mother, is your father?
I never will have the right answer to that.
But she tells the police he was wearing a navy blue swimsuit.
Trunks! I want to yell.
Later, much later, I will learn that the men in this family leave behind questions, not notes. Just like my father’s father, I will take a walk to where the bushes part. Standing there, you feel the train before you hear it. I know.
***
Larry Brown lives in Brantford, Ontario. His story collection Talk was published by Oberon Press, and he recently completed Kurtin, a new collection. He teaches writing workshops to a variety of groups throughout s.w. Ontario
