The most amazing child I have ever met will grow up to be on the comedy channel.
I just re-found a list I made of some of the few things she said when she was 7.
(this isn't to mention the amazing performances she gave in the following
summers)
"Hard orange"
"The Knights of the round ketchup"
"Crusty
lightbulbs"
"The town of hangnail"
"The stinking farm" (as in off to the
stinking farm with yeh!"
"Steel tastes like fat free milk you can only buy at
the dollar store"
"There goes my hearing aid" (every time someone
yelled)
"Computerized walker take me away!"
"Where's my inhaler"
"I
want to eat fabric and catwiskers" (OMG I swear I can still hear her saying this
one!)
"farted heavily on an Iroquois (so?) Indian running down main
street"
"One of my hobbies is trying to untangle this blanket"
"the light
looks like a nun picking her nose"
"pens to Ohio!"
I remember she
would just randomly say things, imitate old women, and laugh nearly constantly.
She also created a song about us counselors being too loud. By that time we had
given up on telling the campers to shut up at 2 in the morning and instead sang
loudly to bother them back.
My god they won't leave me alone. I want to weep and claw at my face. Just lay
screaming on the floor.
I keep hearing the singing of the church, feeling
the emotion it can envoke. I keep seeing the water, luke warm, murky, so still
as the paddle sliced in, as we glided forward. It was silence, complete. The
woods shadows, twilight. We were the only three. It seemed the only three at
all. I was so scared, but not really scared at all. So alive.
And the branches sunken in the water, scrapping the bottom, rising from the shallows to
litter my legs with mud, rotted leaves. I cried out. I could laugh because of
that. Because everything made me cry out. I was so..tense. A place...a strange
thing where the water was still, all rock walls, stone walls made by man. How
long ago? What was this place? Who put that bench there?
Returning to the
lake, it was darker still and we went against the stream. Sweat breaking out all
over me, my arms trembling with fatigue. I felt so alive and the air, it smelled
so good. Just the three of us and it became still.
The water, she saw
something there, moving beneath the surface. My heart was hammering. Anything
was possible. There was just the three of us in the woods on the water. It
seemed there was nothing else for miles. It splashed, sending up violent sprays
of water. Such noise. It had only be our breaths, our whispers. Why did we
whisper? It was the silence, it had made us whisper. I was screaming and I loved
it. I loved being afraid. But I wasn't really afraid. Nothing could harm me.
What was that thing, splashing now in the shallows on the other side?
A large
fin. Why it's a carp. A dancing carp we called them. But why was it doing that
now? Moving as if it fed when it had just fled from us?
We moved closer,
curious, human nature tempting us to terrorize this bizarre creature.
It was funny of
course, oh we laughed. A carp, it was a carp. Why not kill it? Why not roast it
up and have fresh fish? We were wild women. We could do anything, eh?
So they
began to beat it, hammering it with the kayak paddles. And it would sink and rise,
tail spinning, or white belly floating. It would wallow under my boat, under another. Where was it? My god I was frantic to keep my eye on it. We were
screaming and I became angry. Why wasn't the fucking thing dieing?! Die you
mother fucker! Just fucking die! And I had watched at first with guilt. To kill
this thing, helpless, one of god's creatures I think I said. We mustn't, but I
beat it with more vigor then the others. I slammed it with the sharp blade of my paddle, cursing, baring my teeth, water splashing. It smelled foul.
We killed
it.
And she placed it back in the water later, as long as my arm it was, and
it floated away. I think we all felt a little guilty, a little ashamed of what
we had done.
Have you read the lord of the flies?
That night
scares me sometimes..
Later on a storm screamed over the lake, our cabin door moved in the wind and hail thundered down out of a purple sky. We sang into the storm until it passed.
