Summer Camp

Sasha Fletcher is the author of the novella When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets and We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds (reissue due from Calamari Press in 2014) and a couple of poetry chapbooks. "Summer Camp" is forthcoming in a chapbook from Big Lucks Books in early 2014 called Dear Gloria, Dear Madeline, Dear Siobhan, Dear Ethel, Dear Eloise, Dear Wendy, Dear Becky, Dear Lisa, Dear Liza, Dear Michelle, Dear Tamika, Dear Tanya, Tonight.

Image by Olivia Hinds

Summer Camp

There is a sunset and then it's gone because really

what better way to start than with a sunset

that we've already forgotten about? So it's dark

but there are stars in the sky all lit up

like a broken-up gang of light houses spelling out warnings

we can't see and it's not that this is a metaphor

it's just that we can't stop staring

at what we now recognize to a be coffin

that is (and trust us, there is really no other way to put this

because we have tried) dancing its way across the field towards us

and we have called for our relatives to bring beer and refreshments

and then it stops, and so does the music, which we did not even notice

until it was gone. This stop though is, as it turns out,

nothing more than a pause, an instant, and then it's gone, and the coffin

leaps upright, and spits out a grown man in a cowboy suit

with a skull for a head under a hat that could hold

several gallons of something. And the man reaches

for what we can only assume is a gun, as the birds in the trees

begin to chorus like a murder, and listen, because this

is the important part: we did not come here to die. We came here

to go to summer camp says Rebecca the camp director

who is a person

that Michelle Tamika and Tanya just invented

to direct the summer camp they have started

out here in the woods where they have gone

to invent their own dreamboats in this kicked-up excuse

for a party we call life. Rebecca the camp director

leads us all to our bunks, which are well appointed, let me tell you.

We have got some bunk beds and the floor has those pelts

you see in romance novels, and they are everything you think they are

if what you think they are is comfortable and vaguely scented with death.

The loudspeaker mounted on the roof of the porch announces

for breakfast today we are having everything and we are having it

on tables like the civilized people I yearn for you to be. Without dreams

we are little more than figments of someone else's imagination

and I don't know about you but I did not spend my life

waiting to be someone else's light bulb. Today's activity

is building a dreamboat. We are building our dreamboats

to better get to our dreams. I am not asking you to play nice

so much as I am saying that a dreamboat is not a dining hall.

There will be a cool breeze off the lake at lunch time.

Lord knows who invented the Public Address system

but we are the ones who will live with it.

We can feel the breeze on our hair and it is not unwelcome.

There are certain advances that are still miraculous.

At this moment the camera zooms out and pans

rapidly in every direction, which is obnoxious

and disorienting, until finally settling on the lumberjacks

who ask themselves Where did all those girls in the woods go

with their long legs and their fierce eyes

and their barely discernable hospitality and next

we see Eloise and Eloise has some ideas that she is writing down

onto the pages of a journal and then eating the pages

in order to better understand herself and her thoughts

and Sasha is writing out his feelings on the sky

as though that is what it was there for and in the distance

of his barely present interest in the world around him

he notes an absence. Meanwhile Rebecca the camp director

dusts the bunks of insecurities because insecurities

have no place at summer camp. The lumberjacks

start singing that song that starts That Man don't own me/

and that man don't want me/ and I'll be damned/

if I spend one more night carving his face onto my heart

and ends I should really call my father/

for he was never there for me in the ways that counted/

but that doesn't mean he can't be set on fire/

we're speaking metaphorically here/

we are in fact addressing desire/

because desire go Michelle and Tamika and Tanya

is a sad-bound train headed past the sea/

whose spray we could smell on a bad day from miles/

and miles away/ if we had a submarine/

things would be different but if our lives were based/

on all the things we were lacking then baby/

what a glossy magazine we could run/

O baby what a glossy magazine/

we could run. They have a discussion about dreamboats

and the discussion is as follows:

Michelle has finished her dreamboat

and set it on fire. Tamika has finished her dreamboat

and set it on fire. Tanya started but did not finish

five dreamboats, all of which she has set on fire.

Rebecca the camp director

sets the camp on fire. Summer camp

has not yet ended but our dreams

have just begun. Everyone piles in

to a sports car. They do donuts in the parking lot

that sprouted up from the ashes of their dreams

which will not be mentioned

because dreams are private

and the door is closed

and it says Do Not Disturb

and if you are reading this that means you.

The girls leap from their cars which crash

right into each other, and then explode,

and the flames spell out GOOD BYE SUMMER CAMP

WE HAVE LOVED YOU SO and then the flames

turn into heart shaped balloons and the girls

are at a diner, drinking milkshakes and laughing

at the times they have had while all the ghosts

of every man who ever tried to invent a better reality

in the hopes that it would be better than whatever was already there

watch them and drool, and then walk away

because even a failed idea is more than the sum of its failures

o we hope we hope we hope we hope

goes the audience. And they do. And we do.

And you do. And the girls are indifferent

because their failures are real, and personal,

and said failures are weights around their hearts coated

in glitter and in the process

of becoming diamonds. Rebecca the camp director

reaches for the loudspeaker one last time. She is standing

in a burnt out cabin with a window and a wall and a roof

at the shore of the lake she made the parking lot into

because she has always wanted a lakeshore view

as she announces Summer camp is over ladies.

For dinner you are having milkshakes and you are having them

in a diner. Your sunburns are extensive

and beautiful to behold. Your hearts are glittering diamonds

because that is what you say they are but mine

mine is a big bloody thing that hangs by a thread

and I love you all the more for it. Then the camp director

sets the loudspeaker on fire and goes off into the woods

where a party has gathered,

and she begins to wind up a coffin to better represent death,

because summer camp is over, and death is all around

and that is just that.