keyword "reckless" title "the wink" in misc. flash fiction

Sometimes I feel my life has been defined by how few risks I’ve taken, how little stomach I have them. I can’t even parallel park for fear of smashing someone’s car, every driver’s test I’ve taken I passed by the exact minimum, not because I’m reckless but rather over-cautious to the point of spinning back around to danger. In retrospect, Mom was overprotective and while Dad was not so much, she was the final word. My brother takes after Dad in many ways and always rebelled against it while I usually embraced playing it safe. Where two paths diverge in a yellow wood, where most would take the one and Frost would take the other, that’s where I have an anxiety attack, turn around and walk away. Nearly every time I end up doing something exceptionally stupid, however, it is somehow to impress a woman.

The Cove’s a sheer rock wall along the South Side, where the Mohawk and the Erie dance into each other, once obscenely polluted now only normally so. The cool kids would jump forty feet into the even-in-July freezing water on the reg, but I wasn’t one of those. It terrified me as nearly everything did, as nearly everything still does. For years from childhood into my teens, there was this terror-thing a few block-lengths away from my house where all the kids with their natural teenage lack of fear jumped in with abandon while I who was expected to learn life second-hand through books never did. Just the once, though, two cute girls from my class Jennifer and Nina were there as I was passing through, somewhere in my fat awkward middle teens, so of course before I could even think I shed shirt shoes and glasses and I jumped.

I’m told I was so uncoordinated I barely made enough distance in my leap that I was inches from smashing my skull open against the rock face on my way down. I sunk much further than most, being so much bigger, I remember the chill, I remember lungs burning as buoyancy slowly took over and brought me back up. I remember my foot hooking on a shopping cart down there at the cusp of the river’s muck. I remember that it didn’t really impress those pretty girls all that much, but my brother and my friends were astonished for weeks that I would ever try a thing like that.

I remember getting screamed at by my mother for hours on end, through the shower curtain as she yelled about all the infectious things that lived in the river. I remember her making my dad go in to yell at me as well and him doing so for a couple of minutes and then, when she was out of earshot, he winked and said that he was proud of me for overcoming one of my fears like that. Just for those quiet words and wink alone, I will never regret it, even though I probably should.