Feeling: quiet
Listening to: Jeff Buckley - Mojo Pin
Reading/Watching: Fellowship

We arrived in the midst of hugging, breathless talking, swarms of cousins laughing with mouths wide open, too many people asking how college was going, and when he walked into the room I smiled close-mouthed and ducked out of the room, pretending to get something from my car.

Instead I walked out past the dormant garden furrows, turned and slipped between the rusty bars of the pasture gate, and walked across crackling grass to the pond. The wind blew hard enough to strip my hair back from my face and twist it into ropes behind me.

I climbed up the planks of the old fishing dock, and stood at its center, one hand grasping a support beam as the corrugated metal roof whistled.

I used to sit confidently at the very edge of the dock, dangling my feet over, sometimes fishing and sometimes just holding the pole (singing tends to scare fish away), sometimes bouncing and sometimes dancing, often surrounded by cousins, all of us laughing and confident that the heavy gray boards beneath us would always, always hold. Our grandfather built that dock with his own two hands, and it could never falter.

Now, with the wind rushing past me, tugging on hair and clothing, pushing like an invisible hand on my chest, I felt the dock sway, heard the planks creak and groan. And suddenly I was unsafe. Suddenly I knew how old the wood was, felt it protest at my weight, and realized it was never strong.

All these years, we jumped and giggled and played, and beneath the level of the murky water, the wood was always rotted. It took a wind strong enough as this to make me realize how frail and treacherous it had been all along.

I stood there, grasping the beam, face to the wind as it stung my eyes, until my favorite cousin Marie found me. She smiled and called my name from the bank, and I ran into her hugs and pretended my tears were just from dust in the air. She didn't believe me, of course, but let it go.

When my sister first told me the truth about him, I wanted to kill. I wanted to strike him dead with a glance. Or long-range artillery, whichever was handy.

These years later, when my sister sat beside me, older but not better, and still tried not to cry, I wanted to hurt. Wanted to stomp a cleated shoe on his chest and press until the ribs caved in around his black heart. Wanted to make him suffer, and scream the truth to everyone and watch the trust in their eyes falter, as they finally saw enough to look on the beast with revulsion.

Instead little girls ran to him and hugged him around the waist, piping "merry Christmas" in sweet voices, and I left the room with a new excuse every time.

It's disgusting, how no one notices. Those who think to notice don't question. Those who question never speak.

And the years pass unhealed.

Comments? 7 so far...
Not a Diaryland member? Sign the Guestbook.