#102 Absolution

by Jodi McMaster

We arose from the water like fog from the mountains, silent. If you’d looked out the window of the cabin we’d snuck out of, you’d think it was cold outside, not merely humid, with the close gray clouds hurrying across the horizon.

But it was warm, and humid, and the water was the only thing that washed the clamminess away. We were clammy in the un-air-conditioned cabin, trying to sleep with sticky sheets and gummy consciences. Our parents would have killed us if they’d heard.

We hadn’t meant for it to happen. But velvet stars were too hot, and clothes too confining, and it was too dark to risk the lake, a pit of darkness where the lights disappeared, drowned by the ripples created by something other than wind.

So we sought distraction in each other; crevasses and crests to explore with increasing wonder and sensitivity, driven, as teens are, to consume everything with passionate innocence.

It was only after that we worried about it all: the noise, the smell, the surprising messiness of it all. But the birds still called across the water, and we parted, now finding the other smotheringly close.

We didn’t sleep; we could hear each other breathe and knew that fear was coiled in the room, squeezing out the pleasure of discovery. The first whisper of false dawn, and we were out the window, again almost as one.

And the water cleansed us of our sin, if sin it was.