• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 62 0

She’s quite an interesting lady. We were, you know, talking about films. Movies. And her favorites are…let me remember. Oh yes. When Harry Met Sally. And that other one, you know, about that large ship that hits an iceberg.”

“Titanic,” I say. I cram some peas into my mouth. How can Dad not know that?

He goes on to tell me that Terry lives in Esquimalt, which is part of Victoria, where we live. I don’t ask Dad one thing about Terry. I’m kind of mad or confused or something, which is actually how I feel a lot of the time. It’s like my emotions boil up and it’s hard to control them. Weird, I know.

I help do the dishes after supper. Dad talks a lot about some guys at his work, and who said what to who and what so-and-so thought about so-and-so. It sounds mean, but I wish he’d shut up, because it’s incredibly boring. But I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I just dry the dishes and say nothing.

I go back up to my room, leaving Dad to watch some dumb tv show. Something about monkeys. Dad is crazy about nature shows. If there’s a monkey or a giraffe or a lion or a koala bear on tv, he has to watch it. I like action movies—like James Bond movies or Collateral—or shows about police detectives trying to solve old murders. Cold cases, they’re called. I like it best when they dig up an old skull or hold up the rusty, crappy old hammer some maniac used to kill some poor guy, or when they look at a bloodstained pillowcase under a microscope. I guess that’s sort of weird. But I make no apologies.

I put the Beatles record back on and play along to “Here, There and Everywhere” again. Then I get under my covers, not even taking my clothes off. I shut my eyes, sniff my smelly old corn-chip pillow and pretend I’m on that desert island again, thinking about those turtle eggs. They’d be all mushy inside, right? But, hey, you gotta eat to survive.

After a while my thoughts get all confused. You know how it is just before you fall asleep, and your mind starts to go into free fall, where anything goes? From the desert island I go back to that summer at Shawnigan Lake, swimming in the green water with sunlight shafting into the deeper brown-black water. Some big dark fish are down below— it’s scary for some reason. And then I’m dreaming…dreaming that I’m sinking deeper and deeper, and that I can still see the sunlight. But it’s far, far above. And then I’m asleep.