This week’s prompt was: Write a story beginning with these words: “She never let him.”

A Meditation on Death by a Girl Who Wouldn't Swim

She never let him throw her into the pool.  In Aspen, in summer, away from the heat and noise of New York, fleeing August as people used to a century ago, the sun through the mountains glittering on the scalpel-sharp water of a kidney-shaped pool was a horror to Angie worse than gas chambers.  She screamed at the top of her eight-year old lungs, piercing in intensity, and flailed with the hysteria of a claustrophobic pushed toward a high school locker.  Her father's tolerant smile dissolved in shame after the first attempt.

Angie had never been so close to a body of water, though growing up in Manhattan she had been surrounded by it.  The East River—not a river at all but a tidal basin—out her window and the Hudson River a drive away in Manfred’s big black car.  Manfred never smiled except when Angie pawed at his gloved hand to make him show her his ring.  She'd only ever seen rings like that on the hands of ladies, heavy with stone.  With a voice dissolving in emotion he told mommy that it was okay, and not to order Angie to stop asking, when she pulled the young girl aside.

In Aspen, as a big girl of eight, finally allowed to go with mommy and daddy, she found a bedroom like on TV and a park outside the back door.  The woods stretched into the distance and she said she could hear wolves.

— Wolves don't live in those woods anymore, daddy told her.

She pointed out the bloody remains of a hare two days later, when her father had to run after her—giggling fit to split in two, evading him deeper and deeper into the woods, with him laughing behind—that lie as little more than a worried fur napkin amid the dried brown leaves of the forest.

— Dogs, he had said while trying to turn her head by the pigtails.

She had winced at the pull and sounded so much like her mother when she told him to stop that he could only step between her and the carcass to keep her from stooping to touch it.

Angie didn't need to venture into the woods, though, to find what interested her.  A garden of roses—a hundred different varieties, shipped out and planted by Aspen's best landscaper—adorned the sweeping arc of the backyard.  Colors from blood red to fleshy pink to yellow like sunlight through an open window, playing with a lazy cat's nap.  When Angie first saw the garden she ran out laughing and touched every bloom she could, snagging her frock wherever there was a thorn, knees bloody by the time her mother caught her up in her arms.

— They all have today and not tomorrow, mommy, she had said.

— They'll still be there for you to play with tomorrow, mommy said in return.

— But they'll look at the ground, Angie had said as if her mother were slow.

— Some will and some won't, honey bee.

Then they had the man who looked after the house, who rented it to skiers for them, come out and open the pool.  All he had to do was pull off the cover; he'd made all the preparations earlier; he knew.  This was the year that Angie was to learn how to swim.  And then she screamed and her father was a wicked stranger for an afternoon.

Grandpa Gene came up the second week of August and he brought a whole box of Swiss chocolates with miniature paintings on the wrappers.  Angie knelt on the rug in the wood paneled room while Grandpa Gene and mommy and daddy talked about silly things, and she peered into the heavy glass bowl with sharp edges, the chocolates piled into a mound inside, carefully taking each one out and examining the paintings.  When mommy said they'd had enough and Selma said it was time for dinner, they looked at Angie and found she had emptied the entire bowl and sorted the chocolates into groups depending on their paintings.  But as they looked at her rows of chocolate, they discovered that she had not grouped them in like piles of like: Angie had taken them and made scenes.  A farmland on a sloping green pasture, to a windmill turning in a blue sky, then a river with a bridge and an empty cart crossing, then a churchyard surrounded by grave stones with the bell tolling by its tilt.  Again and again the story was told; different paintings, different beginnings but the same ending told in bitter sweet chocolate.  Angie had only eaten one and she kept the churchyard folded in her frock's little pocket near the waist.

At dinner, Angie kept looking Grandpa Gene in the face as if his chewing and drinking were a puzzle she couldn't decipher.  Finally her momma told her to stop staring and Grandpa Gene said he must be growing a fascinating crop of nose hair.

— Why doesn't Grandpa Gene look like Grandpa Paul? Angie asked.

Grandpa Paul couldn't take trips anymore, Grandpa Paul lived far away in that nice big building in Tampa, Grandpa Paul liked to sit by the TV with that funny coat rack with the water bottle on it.  Grandpa Paul had had some bad news last year and somehow he'd learned to live with it.  Grandpa Paul would see the doctors wrong if nothing else, if by a month, if by an hour, if by a minute the doctors wouldn't tell Grandpa Paul what was what.

— I will, Sweet Pea, Grandpa Gene had said when his son and daughter-in-law were winding down on excuses, I will.

Momma had excused herself and run to her bedroom.

They couldn't stay past the last week in August because Angie would miss school otherwise and she wouldn't want to miss it, would she?  No, she wouldn't.  She wondered who would come back and who wouldn't.

One of the last days came and Angie was in the garden while mommy sat on the deck and passed her thumb up and down the screen of her phone.  Angie then came scampering over the pampered lawn as green as a Master's jacket and brought mommy three flowers.  One was a red rose—or would be—that hadn't yet opened, one was a pink rose that was beginning to whiten at the tips of its soft curling petals, and the last was as dark as a banana ready for bread-making, which once could have been any color.

— What's this? mommy had asked.

— I brought you some flowers, mommy.  This one will open and live, this one is alive and open to the sky, this one was open and alive and now droops down to die, Angie said and then smiled all her slightly crooked teeth at her mother's sunglasses-cloaked eyes.

— Dear, th-thank you, mommy said, I don't know what to say.  Why did you bring that one? she asked, reaching for but not touching the dead one.

— Because it's part of the story, silly, Angie had said.  First it sleeps bundled up tight and small, then it spreads out and blooms very tall, then it droops and it sleeps and then flutters and falls.

— Oh, mommy breathed and clawed the glasses off her nose.  Dear, she said, who told you about that?  About the flowers?

— It's the story, mommy, Angie said.

— But the last flower isn't very nice, is it, baby?

— It's the story, mommy, Angie repeated.  You can't start a story that doesn't end.  If you want to sleep bundled up tight and small and then spread out your blooms and grow strong and tall, you have to droop back to sleep and then flutter and fall.  It's one story, mommy.  It's okay, don't cry: the story doesn't end until it's told and the end is what makes it a story.

 I hope you enjoyed reading this short story.  I also have a few novels published through Amazon’s Kindle Store, the newest being The Parnell Affair.  Thematically, it is not very similar to the above but hopefully a good read, too; it’s a political thriller about a betrayed spy, a relentless journalist, and the hidden truth behind a President’s demand for war.  Don’t have a Kindle?  No problem: Amazon provides free apps to view all of the great—and inexpensive—Kindle content on your phone, PC, or Mac, here.  Thanks and happy reading!