Into the Mist
an excerpt
The first hotel room they stepped into smelled of smoke and old vomit. The desk clerk apologized and upgraded them to a family suite.
The vacation had been the kids’ idea. They’d been talking about it for months: “I-agara Falls.”
Even amidst the carnival atmosphere of the town, nature reared its gaping jaws, its ferocity barely obscured by casinos and glow-in-the-dark mini-putt.
Her husband had woken up with the flu, so Jean was alone with the three kids on day one of their vacation.
Thankfully, breakfast was included in the off-season price of the cheap hotel. Probably fancy in its day, Jean mused, staring at the curly wrought iron balcony rails and the film of dust on the plastic fern. The kids wolfed their pasty bagels with peanut butter and each grabbed a banana to go.
At the pool, Jean dipped her toe into the cold water. The chlorine levels were high, she could smell it in the air, and she coughed.
“Hello babble babble. Hello babble babble,” Sally was singing while she splashed on the steps. She’d made friends with a stream one day on a hike in the Dundas Valley. Alice had explained the water cycle to her; she was learning it at school.
“All water’s the same then,” Sally said. Since then, whether she was kicking a puddle or washing her hair, she greeted water as a friend named “Babble Babble.” Jean remembered a distant flash of something like friendship with a cornfield she used to walk through as a kid – a sense of being another stalk of corn herself – but that feeling was long gone and now seemed ridiculous.
