
Year One: We Were Summer Camp Counselors
Written by Maren Antinia Krizner
21 years old
Lemont Furnace, PA
Content Warning: This story contains some adult language
Mostly, we worked 24 hours, 6 days a week.
But July’s dark corners hid a few oblivious nights which wrapped around us
warm like your arm around my waist
damp grass soaking through your ratty bath towel
in the clearing called Green Cathedral, whose complete darkness
forces all perception to immediacy, save the stars.
I could have stared at those stars forever,
and still only seen them as they were
4,000 years ago.
Our hushed argument cut into fucking laughter by the gutural mating call
of a single bullfrog, his song unanswered until it reaches the treeline
and is shredded to echo,
all indicators of linear time dissolved
into wooded reverb. You don’t mention,
not once, that your parents were married here.
I looked where I thought your face might be
until your eyelashes materialized from the dark,
and then your frowning mouth, your shoulders marked in memory
by the tiny hands of the asthmatic boy they last week carried
half a mile through wind rain and lightning,
your hair—another memory masquerading as vision.
Your hair, my hand now entangled
in the objective reality of physical touch,
you were not quite where I’d imagined.
A mile down the mountain,
the men at the rock quarry start their machines
beneath a blanket of electric light
and by summer’s end we could easily differentiate
between the twin sounds of work and thunder.