THE TOPIC OF THIS CONTEST WAS:
Did she just see what she thought she saw? She stepped off the path, intending to only walk a few feet. It was only later that the group noticed she was missing. They quickly backtracked, yelling her name. Tensions rose as the sun began to set. And, that’s when they, too, saw…
(Stories need only touch on this topic in some way to qualify. And, they could not exceed 850 words.) Before you continue reading, take a moment to consider where you would take that story…
Are we recording now? I’ve never listened to podcasts. Too old, I guess. Do you want me to start at the beginning? Alright… I remember it vividly, despite it being thirty-five years ago. How old are you? Right, so I’m older than you, not that it matters. It could be thirty-five years or one hundred and five, I would be seeing it the same now as if I was there, all over again. Not that I would want to be. Do you mind if I smoke? It helps me relax.
There are certain times where I remember it most vividly. When I’m in a deep slumber. I used to look forward to sleeping. I used to have dreamless sleeps, as if I’m suspended in a black liquid. Now I just wake up at 4am in a cold panic, my heart pounding. I see it. It runs through my head, no matter where my dreams start, they always end up back there to that day when she left us. I say that as if she had a choice in the matter.
Other times I see her at sunset, my daughter Sarah. I remember holding her hand when she was a little kid. My wife and I would pick her up as we were walking on the sidewalk and skip her ahead a few strides. She was light as a feather and her whole hand would fit right here in the middle of my palm. On some long days, while I’m smoking here on my porch, I run through my memories of her. Her voice. Her laugh. Her smile. It all ends in the same place. The same place my dreams end. It all ends with what happened on that frozen lake.
I know you don’t want me to beat around the bush. Old men like me take their sweet time with stories because we can. It’s because you, your future – that’s what matters. That’s where your value is. Sarah had her whole life ahead of her. Now, my future is done. My past is where my value is. That’s why old men like me meander when we tell stories because that’s all we have left. That’s all I have left of Sarah. Just her story.
We were on our annual trip to our family’s cabin in Maine. It was two days before Christmas. It was unusually cold, the lake is rarely frozen before January, but this year we had enough cold snaps that you could walk on it. It was me, Sarah, all bundled up, and my wife, Rebecca. We had my brother Carl and his wife Tonya, who was a few months pregnant. A fresh snow had finished falling that morning and we were walking around in the afternoon, enjoying its softness. It’s so remote that in the winter we’re the only ones there.
After Sarah ran ahead to look at the lake, I was talking to Carl about fatherhood. We rounded a corner in the trail to make it back home and got to the cabin. I thought Sarah had either been at the lake or ran up ahead. But when we approached the house, Rebecca turned and asked if we’d seen Sarah. I felt like I had been punched in my gut.
We turned back and searched. The fresh snow held our tracks, so we retraced over and over again, screaming for hours. We carved a path in the snow, our voices got hoarse. We were arguing with each other, Rebecca and I cursing one another for losing sight of her. Losing track of where we looked. We were all so busy, looking so hard, that we all overlooked the obvious. That’s when I saw it.
It was only about three feet wide. But I guess that’s all that was needed for her to fall through. I ran out there yelling her name, not thinking about the ice at all. I get to the hole and all I see in the dark, cold lake is her little knitted hat, floating into the darkness. The police had divers crawl every inch of that lakebed. There was no sign. Not even the hat.
Sorry, I get worked up whenever I talk about it, no matter who it’s with. Rebecca and I haven’t spoken in decades. Carl and I never talk about it because, well, why would we? But it’s with me all the time. She’s with me all the time. And if I want to let her go, I have to find out what happened. I have to know what she saw. I have to know where she went and what happened to her. Because for the past thirty-five years, her loss has eaten me up inside like a hole in the ice that gets bigger every year. I don’t know if anything will ever fill it.
The weirdest part was that, where she must have stepped onto the ice after she ran ahead of us, there were two sets of footprints. Both disappeared at the hole. Who the hell was she with? What the hell did she see?
