Push Back Now, a 31 sentence story

image by @wales Dean Moriarty

The sisters waded as silently as possible into the pond in their back field. The night was very dark, and the water very warm. Nothing could see them. Both women smiled unseen and sighed unheard as they lowered their bodies into the water that was warmer even than the night air, then floated blissfully on their backs.

Both also hazily remembered the extravagant family picnics on the pond’s shores when they were young. One of their lambs would be going round on a makeshift spit. Relatives “for miles around” (as Georgi would say) came to spend the day eating, playing and swimming in that very pond.

Now the women only went there on the darkest nights of the year, and the windier those were, the better.

Georgi was long ago gone, but both the sisters could still hear their great aunt saying “This will all be taken away from us.” Georgi warned them their freedoms were fast eroding. She knew things. She flouted the law whenever she could, saying “There are too many laws.” She never missed a town board meeting, not one. Georgi was a rabble-rouser back then, the kind that would disappear today, like Jonah had.

Jonah often hunted for their food. He shot a rabbit on their very own property, but been hauled away for “discharging a weapon within the town limits” and never seen again. No one knew when the word “village” was changed to “town” in the local law code, but Jonah was the first arrested.

Not long ago the sisters were scrupulously careful to be law-abiding citizens, but that became impossible to do when the laws started changing regularly without warning.

Things worsened.

Farmer Joad was arrested for horseshit too close to a public road; using gas was forbidden, so Joad’s draft horse pulled a cart as he cleared his roadside, and it defecated.

Eunice was arrested for letting her ducks take a dip in her pond like she always had. But livestock was no longer allowed within 250 feet of any waterway so they’d taken Eunice and her ducks away that day, claiming she had risked polluting her own pond.

People hardly dared do anything outside their own houses anymore, not with satellite cameras recording their every move. Who knew when someone might be watching?

To go skinny dipping in their very own pond – and they had decades of tax payments to prove it was theirs – was extremely dangerous for the two women. Extremely. Only on windy new moon nights did they dare go there, ever since human activity of any kind had been forbidden within fifty feet of any waterway. The dark night was their cover, the wind their sound barrier, and the water their most guilty of pleasures.

Tonight they would allow themselves.

Tonight they would float and remember happier times with Georgi nearby.

Tonight they would be grateful for what little was left them, even if they had to break a few laws to enjoy it.