Not Your Typical Day at the Beach

August 22, 2015

Picture this…

Not a cloud in the sky. The sun is shining so fiercely I can feel my skin burning. Ringer, my Boston Terrier, is running along the shore of the lake chasing the waves created by the passing motor boat. Giggling children follow behind it on a sea donut. My three-year-old niece and five-year-old nephew splash in the shallow water with my nine-year-old daughter. My ten and twelve-year-old daughters swim behind the pedal boat driven by my youngest brother and his wife. My mother, father and another sister-in-law have found refuge on shore underneath the shade of a tree. I lay on a sea donut in the water. My feet force the mesh center slightly beneath the surface so that I am ankle deep in water. I lean over the side face-down, my arms hanging into the lake, allowing me to manoeuver myself away from shore. I find that moving my hands in small circles, like the beaters on a hand mixer, move me most efficiently. I am very relaxed. I am thrilled that my family is together and enjoying a break from the normally busy schedule we keep.

As I propel my sea donut forward, I watch my hands carefully. I remark how quickly the beater-type hand movement allows me to glide through the water. Much faster than the breaststroke I had started with. With my face only inches from its surface, I note how the water beneath me is barely six feet deep yet I cannot see the bottom. The water is black. When the sunlight catches it a certain way it appears brown. The water being tossed about by my hands is white. Life is good.

And then my brain goes there. It eventually always does.

I begin to picture life like a movie scene. I picture an audience watching a character like me enjoying a nice afternoon with her family. In the scene in my head the woman has her face even closer to the surface of the water than I do. The camera pans in to her face. She portrays to the audience watching her an air of serenity. She is not moving her hands to propel the sea donut but instead stares peacefully at her image on the water’s surface. The water is calm and unmoving, like the glass of a mirror. Soon there is no sound emanating from the screen. The audience understands that the woman is in such a relaxed state she is able to block out the noise around her. To the woman and the audience, she is the only one in the world right now. That’s when the body appears.

It is not visible until it is inches away from the water’s surface. At this point, the body’s appearance succeeds only in snapping the woman back into reality. The woman does not recognize it for what it is. The body’s nose breaks the surface of the water but all the woman can see is its eyes. They are wide open and filled with terror, even in death.

That’s when someone grabs my foot. In real life!

It was my other brother. I screamed, but not as loudly as you would think considering what was going through my head at the time.

As he laughed I told him his scare session was well-timed since I was envisioning a dead body popping up in front of my face. His response: “Too bad I didn’t come around to the front of you then.”

I agree. That would have been classic!

I like to think that all writers share the same ability to turn off their mind and end up writing scenes in their heads when least expected. Any writers out there who care to share if they have similar experiences? Who else envisions scenes they are writing as movie scenes?