The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

We lay flat on our backs, our feet planted and our knees in the air, the just-setting sun coloring the remaining clouds in plum and navy with Pepto Bismol–pink underbellies and the sky behind them every candy-colored shade of orange, from circus peanut to sugared jelly slice.

I would write it all down. All of it. All the stuff that made me feel weird and mushy and stupid and scared when I went to say it, and sometimes even when I thought about it.

Lots of the leaves on the trees had already turned to shades of yellow, from canary to yield sign to lemon sherbet, and the fall sunlight was distilled through those leaves, the rays bouncing into the shadows around us in that chunk of forest.

listened to the small, high-pitched sounds of the tree swallows and the nuthatches, and smelled the smoke and the wet ground, the good, musty scent of mushrooms and always-damp wood, and I felt all the ways in which this world seemed so, so enormous—the height of the trees, the hush and tick of the forest, the shift of the sunlight and shadows—but also so, so removed.

It’s living the life of one of those prehistoric insects encased in amber: suspended, frozen, dead but not, you don’t know for sure. Those things could have a pulse inside that hard world of honey and orange, the ticking of some life force, and I’m not talking about Jurassic Park and dinosaur blood and cloning a T. rex, but just the insect itself, trapped, waiting. But even if the amber could somehow be melted, and it could be freed, physically unharmed, how could it be expected to live in this new world without its past, without everything it knew from the world before, from its place in it, tripping it up again and again?

I tilted the candle just so and let all the melted wax pooled around the wick spill free and cascade down my knuckles, the trail at first translucent, then quickly hardening into a river of white on top of my skin. Lots of wax cascaded all the way down my hand, off the edge, and into the lake, and once there became magical, tiny floating polka dots, like wax versions of the droppings of a paper punch.