My Emily Dickinson

, a short story ; originally published in flo. lit mag

1.

I don’t want to fill the lake with stones, she says. The boy turns his back, and returns to skipping his slow handful of flat, round projectiles. One, then another. Alief angles away from the beach, up the rise and back to the campsite. The boy acts as though she were never there.

The week she turned thirteen, Alife’s parents announced they were sending her to summer camp. To get away from things, they said. Get out of the house. It will be good for you, they said. Alife couldn’t fathom the benefits of rickety 1950s-era wooden cabins with flaking green paint, or this damp that clung to her clothes and hair. Character building, her mother crooned, and the emptiness of that particular phrase.

More of her mother’s lies. Although this was said more from disinterest than malice. She knew full well: there’s a malice that can be coined from that, also. This faltering camp staffed by disinterested teenagers.

Within hours of being dropped off, she’s already caught three boys harassing one of the younger girls, so she chased those boys off with a stick. Another kept threatening to set fire to things. She wasn’t one for rules, but this was too much. She hated it here.