Of princes and perverts

Sixteen-year-old Marnie was bored to death that summer. She felt like a bug trapped in amber, her lush youth fossilized for eternity. Of course, it was her parents’ fault. Especially her mother’s. She had insisted on dragging them all to an isolated cabin by the lake.

Set at the end of a long, dirt road, it was five pothole- and rut-filled miles to Grandma’s crumbling house and practically a million miles from everything else. The lake itself was a cool, glassy blue and surrounded by rocks and trees. Most of it was owned by the Conservation Society, which meant it was practically deserted. Marnie couldn’t see a single house from the dock.

Even worse, the Internet was as fickle as the weather. Marnie could go a week or more without getting a bar on her phone. When she did, she invariably panicked, rushing to post her lakeside selfies to Instagram. They almost always crashed.

Most days, her father went fishing. Marnie didn’t go with him. Their first outings together had been pockmarked with disasters. She cast into weeds. She fouled her line. And she nearly vomited whenever she caught a fish. Her father’s ironclad rule was “you catch it, you clean it.” The sickening crunch of decapitation and the soft slice through the belly turned Marnie’s stomach into a clenched fist.

Her mother, architect of this doomed summer, was always at Grandma’s or whispering into the old, corded phone about hospice and final arrangements. Whenever Marnie asked if she could help, her mother would blink her red-rimmed eyes and frown. “Grandma’s sick, she doesn’t want to see anyone,” was about all she’d say on the subject.

So Marnie’s days were an exquisite torture. She felt both immortal, suspended in endless, liquid time, and frantic, as if her one and only chance to frolic with friends and flirt with boys was slipping away. She found solace in a simple routine. Every afternoon, she sunbathed and read romance novels. When she got too hot, she’d leap into the water. Wake. Bake. Lake.

She often closed her eyes and imagined herself on the back of a dragon, flying to her stalwart, faceless love. Sometimes, she contemplated going vegetarian, and wondered whether her parents would stand for it. She had already stopped eating fish, and she would never, ever eat dragon.

Related posts:

And then as soon as I say that I am also struck with the wisdom to be able to answer that question; personal choice — that’s what. I am so sad, so devastated by another’s choice to leave in this…

Sedikit mungkin yang memperhatikan atau mengetahui akan kancah musik independen di kota Solo, banyak musisi atau talenta baru kota sendiri selalu bersaing berkarya dan membuat pergerakan berarti…

As we cling harder and harder to Dockerfiles, Kubernetes, or any modern preconfigured app environment, our dependency on billable boilerplate grows. Whether or not that is a problem is a conversation…