In “Water Tower Views,” Liz deBeer captures the intricacies of budding young love—it’s both charming and crude, both bashful and brazen. The reader is given a glimpse of young love’s potential future as well, which grows ever more complicated amid fraught family dynamics. Surveillance and supervision also act as key motifs in this bold flash fiction. —Court Harler
Pushing aside homemade floral curtains, I watch neighborhood boys bike toward our street’s dead end, supervised only by the town’s water tower, a silver globe atop long legs, like a giant metallic spider.
The next morning at the bus stop, they laugh and elbow Billy, mimicking him climbing up the long ladder to the water tower’s top railing, swearing it’s over one hundred fuckin’ feet. How Billy spread apart his legs to pee on the wildflowers below, bellowing, “I can see the whole damn world up here!” They shake their pelvises as if they too are spraying Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans from the heavens. They suck on imaginary cigarettes, blow out phantom smoke puffs, hack from fantasy fumes.
A few yards away, the other girls and I pretend we aren’t listening, aren’t visualizing a yellow stream watering the wildflower field, aren’t wondering if we could make smoke circles too or if we’d choke-gag-retch at all of it.
When the bus pulls to the curb, the boys strut down the aisle to sit in back rows, as far from the driver’s view as possible. Sliding into a middle seat, I wonder what else Billy saw from the water tower. Could he see into our houses? Mom yelling at Daddy when he spilled spaghetti on the carpet? Or my older sister smooshed against her boyfriend on the motorcycle Daddy had forbidden her to ride? Or later, Daddy guzzling glasses of Seagram’s Seven and Seven, cursing the goddamn Mets?
As we bump toward school, I wonder if Billy could see me from my window wishing I were with him, looking out over rooftops, yelling, “I can see too!” Or if he sees me now, thinking of him and the boys.
LIZ deBEER is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative based in New Jersey. Her latest flash has appeared in BULL, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres, and others. She has written essays for various journals including Brevity Blog.
Featured image by Dana Kamp, courtesy of Unsplash.
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