By Sydney Guida

Cast the line, pull.

Cast the line, pull.

A figure, darting over the lake: the shadow of a heron. 

Cast the line, pull. 

We are both twelve, and the fat of childhood has yet to leave both of our faces, cheeks so round that even a smile cannot lift them, like they are full of unsung ballads. 

You surrender your fishing pole when you catch no bass or bluegill, and scurry from the edge of the dock to the beach, feet churning up palls of biting sand and salmon-pink shells, waves scaling your back as you face the shore, you pushing your hands beneath the roiled lake, trying to catch minnows with clumsy fingers. Willow trees hang low, blowing their feathers about; sunbeams pry themselves between the shying tree crowns above; branches fall jealous, extend to seize our bodies, rich in youth; and your long eyelashes crest over your liquidy, amber-colored eyes. You look up at me, nose reddened from where the sun kissed for too long, and I feel the water shrink from my legs. Your open palm bears a sunfish. 

We walk the street made of more potholes than pavement, holding the last of summer in ourselves before the exhale into winter, and I want to keep this moment like a forever breath in my lungs, and I want to kiss you, where the sun did, and where the sun did not. Thinking back to the warrior waves, heaving turquoise grace in great, tumbling thrashes against each other—their dance as much as it is their quarrel—and how their sworded white foam sprayed all about us while we searched for flat stones to skip, I ruminate over, and mourn, where I had not looked.

I wish that you had tried to catch a bit more Time for us, something we could peel the scales from and dig our thumbs into and eat. What might it look like, if Time were drawn to your worm and hook? I imagine it with boulderous, quicklime teeth, iron-dense ribs, and seven ugly heads, each with seven eyes. I imagine it would be lemon-sour. I imagine Time could feed a village, but it wouldn’t, because no one would touch it—it appears to each poisonous. Here, adults will not eat it because adults are unaware of what this fish is: More time is elusive, an enigmatic phantom, and they are weary and untrusting. Here, little girls and boys will not eat it because little girls and boys know exactly what this fish is: They are not eager to drag childhood, like burlap sacks of rice, on and on. 

Tell me why there will be a day when we are not roller rinks. Tell me why there will be a day when we are not heavy scooters and plastic fishing poles and grass stains, and the very grass itself, where Earth sprouts her hair thick and green, and where we braid the soil with apple seeds we spat from the apple’s core, and will them, with our tiny minds, to push through the dirt, because they will, because we believe and we command them to. We want to make things grow, and we want to make ourselves grow, because children do not desire more time; they are seldom conscious of it; they want to meet adulthood somewhere warm and somewhere soon. Tell me, why do we wish for that? Tell me why, on this cusp of a shrill teenage cry, I turn a cheek to refuse a haunted call that stares at me from over my shoulder. Tell it to me softly, why life-jaw will cling firm to its teeth and sink into its own tongue, an ache imposed on only itself, why our bodies kill our child in the most terrible ways, and why we are to down this bitter change and pretend it is not glass. I want to believe that I have grown from lake water, from mud and reeds and something eternal, and that I am of chimeric magic and I will never change. I want to believe that the act of sowing seeds alone will produce a beautiful, abundant harvest. I would like to be a child for longer. I beg my own gut to not take this from me.

Yes, I would kiss you, if I was sated with Time. Instead, I push my pinkie into the air, and make you pledge that we will do this again. With this, the entire world stills to listen. There is weight in shared simplicity, and I feel that I may carry it alone, and this promise composing a litany in the quiet cave of pinkies intertwined becomes a religion. Maybe I would not eat the fish; maybe I would be too scared—scared the way I am to swallow apple seeds, like they will take tangled root in my stomach. Is this fright in me the descent of a girl or a woman? 

Cast the line of fleeting Time and pull. 

–

Sydney Guida is a 16-year-old writer from Blandon, Pennsylvania. Her pieces are often lyrical, introspective, and rich in sensory details. She aspires to become a screenwriter.