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, Deawr 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.