this is for you

this is dedicated to Gordon, who died with us one summer day at the swimming hole.

We didn't die, obviously. Not yet.

And Gordon shouldn't have, he wasn't a risk taker, he just had horrible luck.

They took his body and buried it in town. We took his boots off of his body and buried them below the rocks next to the swimming hole. We cut down the murderous rope swing and buried that, too.

We would have buried the river, too, if we could have, just to get rid of it. That thing, with it's venomous innocence, snake-like, had taken eight.

We did what we could. Waited for blood to fade off rocks, throw up (Caroline and Suzanne, who heard the skullcrush, and Chris, who had been in the car with the radio on, but who always threw up when the people around him do), open up a can of beer, and, in my case, fly back to the city and wonder what the hell I had been so afraid of, these past few months.