We’d skip school on Fridays, joke that Fridays were for getting fried, and we’d zip through the small town streets in our friend’s green 510, her muffler hanging on by its fingernails, her stereo cranking the Pixies or RATM, and we’d take turns rolling joints in the cracked spines of our textbooks, hotbox the car with our shared exhales, and it must’ve looked like we were emerging from the backstage of some shitty singing competition, all smoke and frazzle falling into the fresh air when we finally reached the beach at the bottom of Beacon Avenue, and we’d climb down the cliffs to the shore, lie on beds of kelp, and we’d rip off pieces and stuff them into our pasty mouths, laugh when we heard the inevitable crunch of sand between our teeth, all of us thinking how the softness of the seaweed sort of resembled the tongue of the last guy’s face we sucked, and on hot days, we’d shed our shirts, lie topless in the scorch of the sun and burn our tits and stomachs, places we were dying for that guy to run his fingers over again, maybe dipping lower, pressing harder this time, and we’d zone out on the eagles sitting in the trees lining the cliff, watch them teach their eaglets how to fly, watch them surf the tide of the wind alongside each other, and we’d wonder what that must feel like, to jump out of a nest and know there was only so far you could fall before someone else would catch you.
Jennifer Todhunter’s stories have appeared in The Forge, Hobart, CHEAP POP, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pidgeonholes and founder of Trash Mag. Find her at foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.