When you think about your hometown
Flash Fiction-Ish Fridays: 02
Every Friday, I’ll send out a short piece of fiction. Some weeks it’ll be pure imagination. Other weeks, it’ll a slightly altered memory. If you like what you read, leave a comment!
Her hometown wrapped her in a thin veil of ordinary. A constant humming of crickets, cicadas, and boredom seeped into her body— so fleshy, so familiar— that it became indistinguishable from her. She spent afternoons scooping colorful ice cream for extra money. Weekends sipping stale, warm beer in someone’s backyard, smacking mosquitoes off her ankles. The demanding humidity gripped her skin as she walked into school every day. The walkways covered, because who knew when a sunny day would turn to rain.
She didn’t know what more looked like, though she spent afternoons in AP History daydreaming also sorts of futures for herself. She’d snap back to reality at the jarring voice of a teacher who seemed to dread the class as much as she did.
There just wasn’t much to the town. It was your typical suburb—cookie-cutter neighborhoods, boxy strip malls, and sprawling concrete no matter which way she turned. Publix stores with parking lots the size of football fields. A stone’s throw from their much more famous neighbor: the apex of American escapism. A place that millions traveled to every year. Where people paid hundreds of dollars to see a fictional mouse and eat churros the length of their arms.
As an adult, she’d hear the question buzz in her head before people even asked it: “Did you go to Disney all the time?” No. More than the average person, maybe, but still—no. They lived just far enough to feel the tourism industry’s residual heat, like a sunburn from a day they didn’t spend in the sun. Her hometown was the afterthought. A place that existed so workers and their families had somewhere to live. A town no one asked about. One that never showed up in travel guides.
And maybe that was why she daydreamed so much about leaving. She thought anything overlooked must not be worth seeing.
As an impatient teenager, scratching out the days on her calendar with a sharp red pen, counting down to graduation and anywhere else, she rarely gave the place that raised her credit for anything.
But there was one night—just one—when the town ripped back its skin and showed her something different. Something alive.
“Let’s grab canoes and camp out on this island I found,” a shaggy-haired boy suggested. They were all that back then: scrawny girls, pimply boys, bad posture, and believing they were indestructible. But this boy had a magnetism she couldn’t ignore. His face was lovely to look at. A small crush nested deep in her gut.
So, they agreed.
Inky blackness was their cover as they located the blue and red canoes, untied and waiting. Left by another friend who had the good sense not to paddle out to an unknown island at night. They hoisted the canoes onto the rack of her small SUV, cicadas cheering them on like manic cheerleaders.
The boy whose face made her stomach flip navigated to the parking lot of a well-known shack that sold cheap beers and cheaper burgers. Planks of wood nailed together beside the only river worth knowing the name of in their town. Her headlights illuminated the black ribbon of water ahead. It called to them unlike it ever had in the daytime. Quiet, unknown. The icy water splashed against their legs as they fumbled with paddles, adjusting headlamps. Click, click, click. They piled into the canoes, shushing each other so they wouldn’t get caught, and pushed off into the blackness. Evidence of them there, except for her car parked behind a tree, quickly swallowed by the hungry current.
They made no noise, save for the water dripping off their lifted paddles. The night was clear and the moon was their guide, revealing the subtle curves of the river. There was one path; all they needed to do was follow it until the boy said when.
She dunked her paddle into the water and felt droplets kiss her skin, electric and cold. All around her, the moon’s silver lines danced on the surface, and she prayed she didn’t spy eyes reflecting back at her, waiting for one of them to lean a bit closer to the water’s surface.
Then something shifted.
She felt it, somewhere in her chest, or maybe her bones. It crawled up her arms and stole a few of her breaths. The night, the river. They were speaking. In a language she hoped her friends understood. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe she wanted to be the only one the night spoke to. It was as if the river knew this time would come— that she would be there— and her only job was to witness it.
The secrets spoken to her were this: her hometown wasn’t concrete afterthoughts. In fact, it was the buildings that came later. The real history—the one that predated any Target or traffic light—was the land. Banks lined with razor-sharp palmetto leaves and air thick with the scent of cypresses. Trees whose lives were longer than generations of her family. It was abstract, wild, the opposite of the neatly planned highways and gray strip malls. Nature grew where it wanted. It did what it wanted. This place was the definition of alive. Everything she craved without knowing it.
And in that moment, she wondered if she’d misunderstood it all—not just the town, but what it meant to belong to a place. She’d been so focused on escape, she didn’t allow herself to truly see.
The veil over her eyes lifted as the canoe glided along the river’s current, and she sat back. As if she were on those waters alone. Thankful. Finally, she was witnessing something more.
A shared moment between her and the place she never wanted to call home. But home had always been the wrong word. Because no one could claim something this beautiful as theirs.
It claimed her.
That night claimed her.
She still left. She chased bigger things. But now and then, a scent or a sound takes her back, and she wonders what else she left unseen.