By Shelley Johansson
Old-school canvas tents scattered like children’s toys (don’t touch don’t touch in the rain, it’ll start to drip), smelling of oilcloth and dried leaves. A tarp my daddy rigged across the concrete picnic table, crisscrossing spider web of ropes draped with bathing suits and towels. Everything and everyone patched together improvised and coated with a light dusting of sand. We six cousins, three girls and three boys, slightly sunburned in a child’s paradise.
Cooler filled with cheap generic Chek sodas, ginger ale, cola, root beer, grape, orange (sure, you can have another one). Thick white goopy sunscreen (come here you’re getting red) on the soft white beach with the rhythm of the waves, riding the waves, do it again, salt in our eyes. Meeting the seagulls’ cold gaze. The unavoidable abrasive exfoliating grit of sand in everything, sunscreen sandwiches sleeping bags crunch crunch crunch (let me shake that out for you).
Flashlights flicking back and forth (turn that off, the battery will die). Insects in the bathhouses, moths swirling around the Coleman lanterns glowing with an ominous loud hiss. Possums sauntering through the campsite at night, raccoons in the garbage, salt breeze keeping the skeeters down. The firepit’s gentle crackles as flames like the wood (that’s enough s’mores, kids). Smoke making reality wavy, calling forth the monsters in the shadows, shadows everywhere, leaching from the branches of the long-needled pines.
We six cousins watched the monsters as they danced, safe in the warmth of the fire, our parents’ protection, our love for one another, safe in the ring of light we had created together.
We six cousins around the fire, innocent of the monsters we couldn’t see, the monsters yet to come, the monsters in ourselves that would have to be named, the monsters of the world we didn’t know.
Shelley Johansson lives, writes, and sews in western Pennsylvania. Her flash nonfiction has appeared in Pithead Chapel, the Prairie Schooner blog, Rejection Letters, Transformations, and Schuylkill Valley Journal Online, and her essay “Sewing Lessons” for Salvation South was an editor’s pick for Longreads. Twitter: @shelleyjohansso, or Instagram: @shelley_johansson.