Editor's Appreciation, February 2009
Tai Dong Huai’s flash fiction piece “The Island” contains all the elements of good flash fiction—an interesting character, a dramatic plot, and a surprise ending. The reader goes through the first few paragraphs mourning for a town’s tragedy. By the last sentence, the reader is forced to rethink the situation. Tai Dong Huai skillfully provides us with an unsettling and thought-provoking commentary in just over 500 words.

At Wampano Pond, a few hundred feet behind my house, Peter Carreli drowned. He was in my fifth grade class at Woodhaven Elementary School, and even came to my horse-themed eighth birthday party, the only boy among seven girls, because his mother and my adoptive mother were in the same book group.

One July morning, Peter was swimming with a bunch of other eleven-year-old boys. It was a day-camp trip, supervised by a trio of teenagers who later admitted they may not have been paying “as close attention as they should have.” Swimming was allowed, but discouraged; the fact that there were no lifeguards on duty was clearly posted.

We called it ‘The Island,’ but it was nothing more than a large wooden raft, built most likely by someone’s dad, and anchored at the pond’s deepest point. It served as a resting place, a “launching-off” area, a place to pick up some really nasty splinters. The police report, later published in our weekly newspaper, stated that apparently Peter was swimming underwater, tried to surface, but didn’t realize he was beneath ‘The Island.’ He may have run out of air, he could have hit his head, or perhaps in his panic he wasted time trying to push the immovable mass of planks and carriage bolts out of the way. The kids on the raft above, if there were any at the time, would have probably been preoccupied and unaware of a struggle below. The police report went on to say that no one at the pond even knew he was missing until later that morning when his beach bag remained unclaimed on one of the picnic tables.

From the tree house in our yard my view of Wampano Pond, even through the leaves that conceal me, is clear and unobstructed. So I saw it all. The boys, including Peter, pairing up for ‘buddy-count,’ the three teenagers going behind the cinderblock bathroom to share a smoke, Peter sneaking past the blacktopped basketball court and into the water instead of returning to the picnic tables with the others. I saw him quietly dip down and never resurface. If I’d shouted as loudly as I could have, someone would have heard. If I’d lowered myself from my perch, and ran through the woods, I could have been at the pond in less than thirty seconds.

Our newspaper headline the week he was buried read: ALL OF WOODHAVEN MOURNS.

But the truth is that I never liked Peter Carreli, nor do I miss him. Not even when I see his mother, gaunt and joyless, standing in line at Blockbuster. He was loud and bossy, and called me “flat face” in front of his friends. Once, on the athletic field, he and Jeremy Reilly pinned me down in the grass. Jeremy kept my feet from kicking while Peter straddled me and held my arms. Just before Mrs. Stein came over to break it up Peter, his face not four inches from mine, grinned and said, “Do you know what ‘rape-a-girl’ means?”

On winter nights, after the leaves have fallen, I can see a small slice of Wampano, crusted with ice, from my bedroom window.

Like me, it keeps its voice still.

Tai Dong Huai, a 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee, was born in Taizhou, China. “The Island” is from her collection in progress, I Come From Where I’ve Never Been. Other selections have appeared, or are scheduled, in Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Pindeldyboz, Thieves Jargon, Wigleaf, Word Riot, The Rose & Thorn, and other terrific places.