I wasn’t backing down. I descended the ladder like a staircase, a flight between floors. That’s what I told myself. I suspected the boys already done with their descents watched me, the last man, and wondered, though they might have had other things on their minds: “I am in the ocean dropped from a ladder that will not stoop to me…that I could not reach even if it offered me a hand.” “I do not know how long I can tread the water that alternates between kindness and cruelty.” “There is the dead man’s float, and there is the dead man’s float.” If they weren’t having these thoughts, what then? I knew these boys, and they knew me; we saw eye to eye, and I would do a better job of it if I had an audience. This was not a diving board, and I was not a diver. I was a man on a ladder. I winced from one rung to the next braving the pain, the stab of the spartan bar against the bare, tender foot. As I alternated among arches and balls and heels on the metal and slid my hands down the rails, I saw sharks in the water with the boys. They were good boys, and so I figured they must be good sharks to leave them alone, at least thus far.

Richard George

Richard George is a Tulane graduate whose work has appeared in Mystery Itch, HASH, Toho Journal and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. When not writing, he works as a probation officer. He lives in an apartment in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

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