No Map Response (4/28/16)I smile at Emily, and she smiles back.
"My competition is on Friday, Regs," she says. "I'd like you to be there."
"Of course," I say, because I can't remember a summer where I didn't watch my little sister surf.
"I'm going to win this year," she says confidently, as if I said I doubted her. She smiles fiercely, and then runs off, probably to go surfing with her friends as practice.
I remember watching Emily's first surf competition, summers ago, when she was six and I was twelve. It was the summer she surfed for a recreational league that focused on learning the basics of surfing. Still, she wanted to sign up to be in a competition, even though she'd only practiced on simulated waves with a board so beat up and used that you knew just had to have belonged to seven people before her.
Courtney and I sat on a blanket on the sand with a perfect view of Emily when she started to paddle out. Already, she looked a little rocky, like she didn't really know what she was doing. She got far enough out, and laid on her board, waiting for the perfect wave to catch. My entire family was holding their breath. I don't think I blinked.
Then, between one blink and the next, Emily disappeared. Her board dipped, but Emily was gone. She'd fallen off her board, but I didn't know that at the time. Instead, I thought she got eaten by sharks, or something equally horrifying.
I started screaming, yelling for her to come back up. I was scared to death, crying for my younger sister, just wanting her to come back to me.
No doubt Courtney was scared, too, but she never showed it. She took my arms, pulled them around and forced me to face her. "Emily's fine," she said steadily, shaking me a bit, and I stopped screaming. "She just fell off. She'll get back up and try again, okay? You hear me, Regan?"
I nodded and turned back to face the endless horizon. Emily eventually popped out of the water after what felt like five year, but was really only five seconds later. I cried, and ran towards Emily and held her tight once she got back on the sand, not wanting to ever let her go again.
Emily smiled, telling me that she was okay, that everything was fine. "I swam with the fish," she claimed excitedly, pulling away from me. "They showed me the mermaids!" I was too overwhelmed that I didn't tell her to shut up, that none of that was real, like I usually did.
Emily didn't get beat easily, not even when she was young. In that way, she reminded me of Courtney. She didn't need a map, to show her anywhere, because she would make her own, ignoring all the dark places, pretending they didn't exist.
The thing was, when Courtney and Emily ignored the dark places, I did too. It was easy to just forget about them when they didn't come after you. But now, with Courtney classified as a runaway and my younger sister finally, finally, defeated, I had to wonder.
Do my sisters have a map of the dark places after all?
I chose this piece because I felt like it best established the relationship between the main character and each of her sisters. While writing this, I had a line from the poem embedded in the piece, but I felt like it was almost trying too hard, so I decided to not put it in there word for word, but almost allude to it. I also made the piece longer, and added more description about the day Emily fell off the board, because in the original, it was more of a "she fell off, now I'm screaming." So I added the blanket, and the family watching before she fell off.
Comments
Post a Comment