Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25383866-20161021144248

Hi all. Trying something new, wrote a sketch of a lil story I'd like feedback on. Tell me if it's boring, derivative, bad, silly, inconsistent, etc. Appreciate it.

BETH'S CAIRNS

Beth Morris lived half a mile or so down the road from me. We’d play sometimes, I remember, but we never made the crucial step from playmates to friends. She was a shy, pretty girl, in a dark sort of way. Her hair was always short, the unfortunate aftereffect of an impatient mother armed with a ceramic bowl and an electric buzzer, but she never seemed bothered by it. “Ma says it’s a pixie cut,” I remember her saying once.

Her family and mine were two of the ten who lived on County Road 1227 in those days. There was a creek-bed that ran along parallel to it, and my house was across a short concrete bridge that spanned the dry bed. That was one of my favorite spots, under that bridge. The creek only ran when it rained, so it was usually home only to gopher holes and the occasional mangey deer. You could stack the rocks to make walls, so the other boys and I would ride our bikes down there to play Bunkers after school got out.

Beth and I played there a couple of times. I showed her the best way to stack the rocks so that enemy projectiles wouldn’t come through the cracks. “That’s boring,” she said. “I’m going to build fairy houses instead.” She started placing rocks one on top of another, growing progressively smaller until she was stacking pebbles and dust. I don’t know what her family life was like, but once I had shown her the bridge, I started to see her there by herself more and more, building her cairns.

I think she was skipping school to go and play down by the bridge. I would see her smiling up at me from the creek-bed with her pleasantly crooked teeth as I rode past on my bike, and I could hear her grunts and the powdery clack of rock on rock behind me. Sometimes she’d still be there when I came home in the afternoon, sitting on a stump protruding from the bank, observing her handiwork. If she wanted she could have made better bunkers than most of us boys did, tell the truth.

One spring, it rained a lot. I think I was 12, which would have made Beth 11. The boys and I had lost much of our enthusiasm for Bunkers the summer before, but Beth’s perfect stacks were still popping up, and they had been all winter. I remember seeing her tracks in the snow on the way to the bus, which only ran when the weather was worse than a tornado in a shithouse, leading under the bridge. She stacked snow instead of rocks, and when I came home at the end of the day, I would see perfect towers of packed snow facing each other below the bridge like frozen soldiers.

Well, like I said, that spring, it rained. A lot. So much so that the creek under the bridge flooded. It rose by nine feet, covering the bridge and overflowing its banks, the brown torrent ripping at the concrete pylons. It poured onto the county road. I remember looking out at the foaming water rushing through the metal railings, felt it tearing against the underside of my dad’s truck as we drove to the community disaster shelter, and to me, it looked alive, full of malice, like a seething, rabid animal.

When we got to the shelter, I looked for Beth among the other children there, to tell her sorry about her fairy houses. The flood would have knocked them all down, sent them skipping along the bottom of the creek-bed in pieces. For some reason, this filled me with a deep, inexplicable sadness.

I didn’t find her at the shelter. No one found her, even after the waters had gone back down. She was the only victim of the flood. Her parents knew she liked to play down by our bridge, they said. They thought that she had been down there the day of the flood, that she had been caught by surprise while she was building her cairns.

Her parents moved away after that. We all went to her memorial, ate lukewarm lasagna at a fundraiser for her family put on by the H.A.

After the waters dried, signs were put up all down the creek. “FLASH FLOOD HAZARD.” The creek had flooded before in the community’s history, but somehow, Beth was the first to be killed. Just bad luck, I suppose, or bad timing. Semantics.

I grew older. I forgot about poor Beth. But… Beth didn’t forget me. One day, during the spring before I turned fourteen, I decided to go down to the creek. I hadn’t set foot on that dry earth in almost two years, but something compelled me to ride my bike down to the end of my driveway and check out the creek.

What I found there shocked me to my core. All up and down the creek-bed, as far as I could see, were dozens of perfectly stacked rock cairns. 