The sun shone on the water and made shimmery spotlights on Ella Mae’s red-brown skin. In the place where there were no rocks or fallen branches for the flow of the creek to contend with, it was smooth, brown coffee, but just up stream where a big grey boulder stood up out of the water like a tortoise shell, the foam and force of the current were visible.
“That’s where we’re goin,” Ella Mae rolled up her pant legs and I widened my eyes into a slanted frown that surveyed the blackberry vines with their thorns anxious for my bare ankles and arms. I surveyed the orange mud turned brown clay around my sneakers; the swarm of mosquitoes above the black silk of Ella Mae’s hair as she descended to the water.
The crows cackled above my head and I looked around to see who might be watching us – me in the tattered overalls with no shirt beneath, my new breast buds itching, Ella Mae in blue work shirt cut off at the sleeves, jeans rolled up to her thick calves.
The water was cold and welcomed on a one hundred degree day. I steadied myself, my shoes dangled from their laces around my neck the same way Ella Mae carried her boots, and the cold current around my ankles took rhythm with the flow of my blood.
“Be still,” she said where we stood next to the grey boulder, and she did not have to tell me why. I felt the slow leaching of pain flow away with the tumbling current, and I first stuck my hands down in it; the sun and movement of water over them transformed hands into shimmering fish. Then I lay down, the whole sky above me, the current below me; my head, my heart, all washed clean. I closed my eyes and heard the lapping water laugh, “Hallelujah,” and opened my eyes to see Ella Mae – the solid bone trunk of her silhouette over me smiling.
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