Year One: We Were Summer Camp Counselors

Written by Maren Antinia Krizner

21 years old

Lemont Furnace, PA

Content Warning: This story contains some adult language

Mostly, we worked 24 hours, 6 days a week.

But July’s dark corners hid a few oblivious nights which wrapped around us

warm like your arm around my waist

damp grass soaking through your ratty bath towel

in the clearing called Green Cathedral, whose complete darkness

forces all perception to immediacy, save the stars.

I could have stared at those stars forever,

and still only seen them as they were

4,000 years ago.

Our hushed argument cut into fucking laughter by the gutural mating call

of a single bullfrog, his song unanswered until it reaches the treeline

and is shredded to echo,

all indicators of linear time dissolved

into wooded reverb. You don’t mention,

not once, that your parents were married here.

I looked where I thought your face might be

until your eyelashes materialized from the dark,

and then your frowning mouth, your shoulders marked in memory

by the tiny hands of the asthmatic boy they last week carried

half a mile through wind rain and lightning,

your hair—another memory masquerading as vision.

Your hair, my hand now entangled

in the objective reality of physical touch,

you were not quite where I’d imagined.

A mile down the mountain,

the men at the rock quarry start their machines

beneath a blanket of electric light

and by summer’s end we could easily differentiate

between the twin sounds of work and thunder.