Letters in a Bottle
Flash Fiction
That summer I was thirteen, and newly motherless. Both states I had been anticipating for many years but caught me off-guard with their horrible reality. Each, I felt, could have been soothed a bit if not for the fact of the other. Becoming a teenager would have been easier with a mother, someone to take me bra shopping and tell me which lipstick matched my coloring and how to talk to the boys I liked. And I assumed losing my mother would have been easier if I had a chance to grow into my skin a bit, if I had watched her wither away from age instead of the cancer that had been eating at her body bit by bit since before I was old enough to really understand what was wrong. All this is to say that at that point in my life, I felt very young and exceptionally grown. Which is maybe how everyone feels when they’re thirteen. Maybe I wasn’t as special as I thought.
Dad had decided that Xavier and I were old enough then to stay up at our cabin by ourselves all summer with him only coming up on the weekends. My brother was seventeen and could drive us into town to get groceries from The Piggly Wiggly with the four fifty-dollar bills Dad left on the kitchen counter every Sunday night before he drove back to Madison for work. Although he made an appearance, I don’t really remember Dad from that summer. After Mom died, Dad kind of slowly faded out of the world, eaten up by guilt and loneliness, which can be aggressive in their own way.
Xavier took advantage of the lack of parental supervision to chase after the girls who stayed at the resort down the road – every week a new crop. He slept past noon, drove our boat over to take them water skiing, and stayed out late, drinking beer stolen from their parents.
To prove to myself that I was mature and fearless, I took to spending the nights reading Harry Potter in the Adirondack chair down by the lake, a booklight clipped to the cover. Even wrapped up in the alpaca yarn cardigan my mother had knitted for me, I shivered. She had knitted it for me two years ago, but it was still too big, as if she knew even then that she wouldn’t make it and wanted me to have something of her I could take on into the future.
By the end of June, I started to find the waves and the darkness rather calming. I could turn off my little booklight and look up at the stars, pick out the constellations Mom had taught me: The Little Dipper and The Seven Sisters and Sagittarius. Though the Adirondack was stiff and wooden, I sometimes found myself nodding off out there on the beach. One time I woke up as the sun was starting to peek up from the trees across the lake, and it was then that I found the first bottle knocked by the waves against the shore. I picked it up, cursing the idiot who threw garbage in the lake and thinking I’d take it in for recycling, when I noticed a piece of paper curled up inside.
I had to use the tweezers form the first-aid kit to coax the paper out of the bottle, and then when I did, I found it was a love note. It was written with a blue ink pen, with pieces of it crossed out in Sharpie.
My dearest,
I lay alone at night and think of your warm [redacted] next to mine. How I long to hold you again. How I long to [redacted] your sweet [redacted]. To squeeze your throbbing [redacted] in my hands and whisper tender nothings as you drift off, pleasantly to sleep.
I had no idea how to fill in the blanks left in the note, though, now thinking back as an adult I have a pretty good idea of the sentiment. It is a testament to my youth and innocence that I imagined those notes, that became more numerous, with more and more words blacked out as the summer went on, to be penned by a boy my age, a boy who stood at the shore and saw me on the other side, a girl at the tip of womanhood. A girl so lonely, she’d create an entire person out of trash she found on the beach.