Too Heavy

A Flash Fiction Piece 

April stood at the edge of the lake, her toes were getting wet. I walked up behind her and wrapped my arms around her frail body. I pushed her long hair over to one shoulder. She shivered at the touch and pulled my arms tighter around her. The water rushed over our feet again and again. We stood, fixed in that spot, staring at the opposite shore. The shore we would never get to, the one we had stopped believing in anyway. My mind flashed to the image of her holding a little girl, both of them wearing dresses, sitting on a blanket spread out on the grass. I returned to this imagined image almost everyday but each time the grass grew brown and April’s face became blurred and the little girl disappeared from her arms. I shook my head to clear the vision, hoping that somewhere in another world we were allowed to live that life.

I gripped her tighter and took deep breaths. The air had a chill that neither of us tried to stop from seeping into our skin. I closed my eyes, forcing this moment to stay frozen in time. I tried to picture us as a statue that would never, could never move. My feet dug into the rocky shore, my arms locked around April’s form, my jaw clenched. Stay in this moment. But it passed. April let her arms drop to her side. I let her go. She moved away from the shore. Her delicate dress blew in the wind until it was too weighed down with water. She kept moving and I followed. My clothes grew heavier. It became harder to continue but I did anyway. My movements were not my own. The pressure in my chest was almost unbearable. Only her confidence and my promise to her made me follow through.

She stopped before going too far out and turned back toward me. When I reached her I put my hands on her cheeks. She was terribly cold. The gold flakes in her hazel eyes were sharper today than I had seen them in awhile, since before she got sick. I tried to lock that image away. She pressed her lips against mine, soft at first and then so forcefully that I had to plant my foot farther back to steady myself. Then she slowly pulled away, her eyes held mine. My hands moved down below the surface and met hers. She slipped under, her face became paler and paler. Her grip was light and then tight and then impossibly tight and then she let go. I let her go.