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The Sun is Warmer Down by the Lake
by Allina Nunley Sadie felt the heat of the sun on her pale, freckled face. The heat was a refreshing contrast to the cool water around her feet. She loved the lake and the land that surrounded it, dotted with little antique houses. She remembered the people that used to live in those houses. Sadie recalled playing with Blondie & Barbie Cartwright. She made fun of their names; they made fun of her red hair. Mrs. Gilbert, always wore giant sunglasses, the oppressive, boxy kind that are an unfortunate mainstay among the AARP crowd in the Midwest. She never seemed to take them off. You could never be sure if she was staring at you or not. Barbie had often theorized that Mrs. Gilbert didn’t have eyes at all. Jim Gary claimed deep roots in the community. He said that he was partially descended from local Indians, and that his people had lived by this lake for many hundreds of years. Jim was very attached to this almost certainly fictitious origin story. He had a wooden flute that he liked to play at sunset out by the water. His playing never matched up to the Sounds of the Iroquois cassette that could always be heard wafting from his pickup as he pulled into his driveway. The neighborhood kids never minded though. They spent many summer evenings dancing around Jim Gary and his flute. It was all very Mayberry-like in Sadie’s head. All of the bad things, the squabbles and pains, had been glossed over. That was the joy of growing up. Sadie looked down at the lake and sighed. She watched as a little twist of her foot caused the still body of water to awaken from its long slumber. How long had it been since anyone had swum in that lake? A year? Two? It had been at least six since the first papers where signed. Old Mrs. Gilbert was the first to go. She died one night at the age of eighty-two. The influenza that Karen Samuels had certainly passed on claimed Mrs. Gilbert’s life. Her daughter took over the property. Sadie saw the young woman talking to a man that couldn’t have been from her town. He wore the kind of clothes that people didn’t live in, the stiff kind that you could only stand up in. He had smiled at young Miss Gilbert like a Bible salesman and handed her an envelope. Sadie hadn’t thought that it was important at the time, but it was the beginning of the end. Within a month, Mrs. Gilbert’s rhododendrons and violets were torn from the earth. Her famous roses were dragged to the curb to await garbage day. Jim Gary was next. Sadie’s mother had told her that the stiff man had pressured Jim into it, but Sadie never believed her. She saw the look of shame on Jim’s face as he cashed a big check at the town bank. That was the last time she saw him. One day, Blondie and Barbie just didn’t show up to school. This was how it went. Newspapers piled up on lawns and men with hardhats started showing up in their gargantuan machines. Some people held out, determined to have the only house in a field of industry, but not Sadie’s parents. They thought that a move would be good for their little girl, or so they said. Even then Sadie was not naïve enough to think that parents only took large sums of money for their children. It had been three years since Sadie last dunked her foot in the lake. Her skin had missed the hot sun. The sun up north was never warm enough. Every day she felt a tingling under her skin, a yearning for a place that she could barely remember. This was the place where her mind had been formed, from the depths of the lake. This was the place that she saw in her sleep and in her waking dreams. Even in its lonely state, she preferred the company of the lake to the company of her “home.” Sadie laid down on the grass, exposing as much of her face and neck to the sun’s rays as she could. It was a beautiful day with a baby blue sky, a cool lake, and the whirring sound of machinery coming from just up the hill. |
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