Snapshot

Katherine Langfield

Picture this: it’s your senior year of college. You’re drinking warm beer in the back of your roommate’s uncle’s pick-up truck at the local cliff diving spot. The uncle isn’t here. It’s really your roommate’s truck, but they still refer to it as ‘my uncle’s truck’, as if the current ownership holds very little meaning, and the past is really what matters. The present becomes this: you are too drunk to safely go cliff jumping and your roommate’s truck bed (immortalized forever as someone else’s) is slowly becoming uncomfortable as it heats up under the afternoon sun.

It’s a clear day. This will be no pansy June day where it reaches seventy-five and you halfheartedly fan your face as you step outside between the air conditioned Kwik Trip and your car. No, this is the span of days so hot that the last weeks of July and the beginning of August weld together. Eventually, you’ll sober up slightly with the last dregs of your water bottle before staggering off the cliff, finally finding relief for your sunburning skin in the cool confines of the flooded mine pit.

But for now, snap of a picture of this: your roommate’s middle finger to your thrift store camera, the pile of damp towels and broken flip flops, a growing pile of discarded beer cans. Sometimes sitting at the cliff is more fun than jumping off. There’s a high in the anticipation that maybe you’ll go do some dangerous adrenaline inducing thing. Or maybe you’ll just find entertainment in the car of freshmen that unloads on the other side of the pit. You watch the boys all clambering over each other, pushing, lurching, upheaving themselves into the water in just the right manner to impress the girls, who are already unfurling towels to just lay down and catch a tan.

If you jump off—when you jump off—it’ll no longer be for a dare, or for the slim shot at approval. It’ll be for reprieve from the heat, for that fear inducing moment right before you break the surface tension. Your roommate won’t push you either way, won’t care whether or not you take a nap laying here with your sunglasses on, or if you launch yourself into thin air. Won’t pay any mind unless you don’t come up for air, or if you walk back up cradling a limp, broken wrist spitting blood and bone fragments. They reach for another beer. It’s the last one. They look at you and you nod and instead fumble for the flask that somehow slipped under the pile of towels.

If you don’t instead reach for the water bottle soon, not only will you not be cliff jumping, but neither of you will be driving home. There is a contingency for that, of course. There’s a third, much more conscientious roommate, who isn’t prone to picking up several racks of beer and driving out to the mining pit on the hottest Tuesday afternoon this summer. Send her a text and she’d be here, swearing as she pushed her bike up the last, steepest part of the hill. She’d have extra water bottles and be wearing a swimsuit under her work uniform. Ready for the quick cool off of diving into the water before pushing you and the other roommate out of the truck bed, loading her bike, and pickpocketing the other roommate for the keys. She wouldn’t even make you feel bad for it, would let you fumble through radio stations on the quick five-minute drive back to town, would help you back into the house to the cool confines of the basement couch and put some dumb 80s movie on to pass out to.

But you aren’t quite there yet. The feeling of the touch of the steering wheel is such a distant possibility that you don’t need that contingency yet. This is where you are, where you need to be. Melting in the warm afternoon before the next school year begins. Stress is forecasted in the distance, but the storm is still a ways away. You point your camera; your roommate half grins at you and raises their beer. A click, and the polaroid starts to form.