skinny dipping
by Lisa Lynn Biggar
The summer after my dad and his four brothers gave up on the week-long canoe trips down the Susquehanna, he and my uncle Steve took my cousin, Tammy, and me camping—just down the road from my grandparents’ farm. I was around eleven then, Tammy ten. We set up tents on an embankment above the Tunkhannock Creek. It was only for a night, but my aunt Sandy still resented it and brought my uncle a big bucket of yellow beans to cut the ends off for canning.
My uncle was fuming, so Tammy and I slipped away and found a winding path down to the creek. We weren’t planning on swimming in the dark, didn’t even have our bathing suits. But when we dipped our toes in, the coolness was irresistible, the gentle current lapping over the rocks along the shore. We called up to our dads, the campfire illuminating their faces, the green bottles of beer, the cigarette dangling from my uncle’s lips as he chopped the ends off the beans. I don’t remember if my dad helped him, but I’m sure he did after teasing him for a while. He’s soft-hearted like that. We asked them if we could go in.
“Sure,” they yelled back. “Just be careful.”
Tammy wanted to swim with our clothes on, but I convinced her to go skinny dipping. “No one can see us,” I said. “It’s pitch dark.” The stars were bright, twinkling eyes, but too far away to spy. The moon just a wink in the sky.
She hesitantly agreed and we shed our clothes, giggling, then eased our way in over the slippery rocks. The water cooling, caressing our bodies, carrying us away; we had to doggie paddle against the current, against time.
Minnows tickled our feet, but it was the larger fish, the carp, that frightened us—the fish that nobody wanted to catch because they’re tough and loaded with bones. One of them jumped out of the water beside us and Tammy screamed. Our fathers called down to ask what was wrong, and I said nothing, that it was only a fish. I told Tammy to stop acting like a baby, but there was something ominous about those fish, foreboding.
Thirteen years later, when Tammy was diagnosed with leukemia, I remembered that moment, the carp circling us, so vulnerable in our nakedness. And the feeling that our fathers could no longer protect us from the vast universe. The campfire slowly burning itself out.
Lisa Lynn Biggar received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College and is currently marketing a short story cycle set on the eastern shore of Maryland. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Main Street Rag, Bluestem Magazine, The Minnesota Review, Kentucky Review, The Delmarva Review and Superstition Review. She’s the fiction editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-owns and operates a cut flower farm in Maryland with her husband and three cats. writinglisa.com; twitter.com/lislafleur