Kichi Sibi

If she’d been a regular girl like Janey, painting her nails whisper pink and talking with an affectation on the phone. Or an awkward girl like Amy, tending to elderly parents, holding down a job at the IGA while keeping straight A’s. Or a weirdo like Naomi, even, doing god-knows-what downtown. But Morana would not be pegged.

She could have unfolded her blanket along the riverside and tipped back the warm, flat beer along with the rest of us. Bathed her perfect limbs in the sun, and later, in her late 20s, develop a benign skin cancer on the fold of her ear, go on to become an advocate for cancer awareness, handing out large-brimmed hats and sunblock along the shoreline.

If she’d fallen instead for the saline lick of the Plant Bath, not a ten-minute walk from her front door. She could have floated for the whole day under the patient wings of lifeguards, buoyant on dreams of family back home, and a time when the sky would stop falling and she could return.

We could have insisted. We could have enlisted Mrs. Dunn to demonstrate the physics of currents, explain how the black glass of the Kichi Sibi is an illusion. When Morana shakes her head in disbelief, we would bring in Mr. Gowanlock, who would pick up his chalk and lay out the complex calculations of time vs. speed vs. rip current and undertow. Calculate probabilities. And when Morana pulls out her Award of Excellence in swimming, we would write and perform a play.  It would be in five acts, a classic tragedy, mapping out the river’s sorrows. The time the giant muskie took Willy’s dad’s arm. How Kichi Sibi means great river in Algonquin.

If the water hadn’t kept her whipping around and around as if on spin cycle before pulling her down.