Puddle
Pudd peered over the edge, past the shrubs that looked like blueberry plants but supposedly were not blueberry plants (they tasted like them, round and full but darker blue, like a blueberry ate a blueberry and patted itself for the reverse birth accomplishment). Pudd chuckled, snapped a few off the nearest bush, and stuffed the pregnant blues into her mouth. Blueberries. What had her sister ever known about wild plants? She looked back over the edge. The jump was, what, 25 feet? More? Maybe more. But the pond was deep. Why do they call it a pond? Quarry too southern? It could be a lake. In the Midwest, it would be called a lake. But pond? There must be some science to it, she thought. Maybe. Maybe her sister would have known. Pudd knew or heard or maybe read somewhere that it was once a quarry. Probably filled with bodies at the bottom, she thought. Probably horses. Probably so many broken and drowned horses, ponies once harnessed to stone. My little pony, forever pony, she hummed.
It was 82 degrees in Maine, but the humidity wasn't there to make the jump easy. There was a breeze. A clip of wind that knocked the pitch pine: strong enough in short bursts, but not enough to blow off those stiff needles. Like me, Pudd thought. Ha, that doesn't make sense, she thought. "Like me," she whispered, but with more emphasis on the "like"—simile turned command. And she laughed.
"Pudd, quit messing around. Pudd-Puddle! Just jump." Baron. What an asshole. His head water-slicked at the shaved sides but still springy where the tight curls frocked on top. Baron Von Shammy Cloth, Pudd thought. What were those made out of that you could get them wet and still they'd just bead the water, pill it at a holy center? Ha, so much like Baron. Asshole.
"Hey Asshole!" Pudd yelled. "I could jump, land right on you. So back off, Baron Von Blowhard!" She saw him laughing. Dork. His laugh was more like a squeezed giggle. He'd start with a bark of sound, but then it was like his lungs gave in and he'd just wheeze. Like after the initial fart of the ketchup bottle and then afterward it's all wheezy spurts.
Pudd looked back over the edge. Thought of three—was it three now?—years ago when she and Baron and her older sister, Violet, camped out on the eastern edge of the pond, where the rocks formed a pier over the water just three feet up, made a landing you could more easily slip then swim into. They had cooked vegetarian hotdogs (for Baron) with a tiny fire on the granite. Cracked themselves up with the flatulent ketchup bottle. "That might be how I sound out my mouth, but that's how you sound out your butt!"
Classic Baron. His jokes were less jokes than they were honest observations. And Baron never ever swore. Pudd once asked if he had religion. "You religious? Pray to some dude-god with exposed chest? Why do they all have exposed chests, those dude-gods? Hair or whatever headdress flowing? Always dudes, always flowing." She thought then and now and still, every picture of a god, no matter the god or religion, every image, whether on candle, t-shirt, or flag, or on their neighbor Ellen Weymouth's living room wall, had their chests slightly revealed and flowing material above their heads—hair, fabric, flowers, feathers, rays of light, whatever—always flowing. Baron would simply shrug. Pudd never pushed it, not for lack of wanting to annoy, but for lack of any real interest in the subject. And Baron never pushed any belief on her, thank god.
Ha, Pudd laughed. As if reading her thoughts (he did that sometimes, it seemed), Baron yelled, "Believe in yourself, O-Mighty-Puddle!" Followed by more ketchup flatulence. Pudd cracked up, almost stumbled too far forward. This was not the place to belly flop or falter and stumble, abuse the water so it abused you. Shit, how can he not be cold yet? They'd been at the pond for what seemed like hours, meandering on the perimeter trails before hiking over to the southern edge where the cliff was. Baron hadn’t hesitated. He jumped into the pond once they made it to the top. Baron had already jumped earlier that summer and several times since. But it was too early then for Pudd. Too soon. The humidity was there though, during all of June, July, most of August—was there most of the summer. Hot. Sultry.
"The night was sultry." She and Baron had watched Throw Momma from the Train countless times. Discovered the movie one day years ago, and the dialogue became code for them at school. Whenever they wanted to signal something that needed to be said but they didn't want the other kids to know? One of them would whisper, "the night was sultry," and they'd later meet up and laugh about their wit, often forgetting what the coded message was meant to reveal. Kids didn't know what to think of Pudd at first—she was from Minnesota and called herself Pudd instead of Rose, Rosie, or even Bud—and Baron was liked well enough, but pretty much dismissed by everyone as being Mainer trailer-poor and fantasy-LARPer-nerd-boring. They teamed up the fall of third grade and spent most of that winter watching movies from the public library and playing them on the old DVD player in Violet's room.
"Rosebud Pudd!!" Baron yelled again before dipping underwater. "R O S E . . . PUDD!" He yelled, slow then fast, when he emerged again. Again, like he read her mind. We watch too many movies, Pudd thought. Her sister, Violet, had a favorite: Blue Velvet. "You wouldn't get it," she had once told her. But Pudd knew she was just trying to goad, hook her, get her interested. Violet loved to mold young minds and saw in Pudd's the deepest, most binding of clay. "So, what's it about . . . a horse?" Violet loved horses, so the mistake was a logical one. Violet laughed. Not like how Baron laughed, but with an elegant, sparrow song that became a deep guttural guffaw. God, Pudd loved her laugh. God, everybody did. God, how she missed her. Fucking god and gods—flowing hair, chest exposed or otherwise—how everybody did.
"Rosepudd, I'm a freezin'—just jump. The force, the gods—is, are, what?—I hate English class—are with you!" Baron again, reading her mind again. How he did that. And he didn't hate English class—he loved to read and write, well mostly read—but he hated grammar. Violet would try to teach them during the summers, give them brief lessons on how to tell a story and the importance of verb tense, down by the pond. The story part was the best part. They'd tell jokes as periodic sentences and then the challenge was, "now make the punchline, that final clause—how it all ends—matter." Violet. Always with the added meaning—the apparent subject, the deeper subject. Always with the layers. Always, always something better beneath it all if you just kept working, kept scrubbing away.
"OK, how about this. I'll do it, I mean, I'll jump with you. Same time. Twinsies. Partners in leaping—Lords of Leaping," Baron said. He had climbed back up the face of the small cliff. Used the swinging rope to heft his scrawny frame over the last boulder, the one bearded with blueberries. "They're serviceberries, Rosebud," Violet had said, “Serviceberries." It took her forever to call her Pudd, the name Pudd kept after so many years of mispronouncing it herself, said the B as P: Rosepudd. "I'd rather be a pudd…puddle of water than a bud of, what? Bud is gross. Like a ripe blossom. Like an orb. Like being stuck and pregnant—infected with something about to burst or flower and flower. Or like, like it's more simple: hey there, bud-buddy-friend. It's like the early version of bro or brah: nah, brah, nah, bud. I like Pudd. I mean, I'm ok with it." And finally, Violet, in those last few months, had called her Pudd. Three months before she slipped, before she fell, before she hit her head and took in all the water, not from this pond—their favorite place, the place she'd take Pudd and Baron to swim and learn stories and grammar and the names of berries, and not from any lake or ocean or any natural body of water—but from a fucking bathtub, a large gleaming one with jets and a coastal window view. And Pudd had responded to her sister finally calling her by her chosen name with, "Thank you, oh wise Violet, oh flower of delicate floating petals." Pudd knew she could be a jerk sometimes. But being a jerk without consequence was just being a kid.
She turned toward Baron. "I think I'm too cold. Maybe another day. Maybe I'll jump next week. School's only a half-day." Summer was ending. They'd start ninth grade. High school. Violet would be in her second year of college, had she had a first year. Had she not fallen before the summer after her last year of high school. Had she only gone to the pond and jumped and swam and started summer like they always had there in Maine, and years before that in Minnesota. Had she not chosen to work, to clean homes, to stay within them, readying them for the summer season. Homes with bathtubs big enough to be baptized in. Summer always did begin with water, with diving in. With a jump, not a fall. With a decisive pivot of the heels and dovetailing of the hands, arching of the back, and a wanted splash, an anticipated one. With the baptism of the cold water of a lake, river, ocean, or pond.
Pudd hadn't swum for two years. Hadn't soaked in a tub. Hadn’t allowed her body to be adrift or immersed in water. She showered, of course, and once told Baron, "I accept my name as Pudd because I designed it, but I won't become Mud-Pudd." So, she showered. But the pond, the quarry, the lake with all the ghost-dead, stone-carting ponies, she avoided. Too cold. Too windy. Too fucking full of water, Baron Von Asshole. And Baron would always just laugh in his light, angelic way.
"Hey, I'll jump with you, " he repeated, catching his breath. "But we can also just go next week or later, whenever later might be. Maybe even in a few minutes, should you want to go together now." He found a flat spot on a neighboring rock. "I'll sit right here, Puddle, next to our Puddle." Pudd smiled and turned back toward the ledge. The water was calm. The wind had faded, and the sun's intensity had begun to soften as it inched and inched below the tree line.
One night that final year, she and Violet came down to the lower rocks to watch the meteor shower in the late winter, early spring sky. Violet knew the names—of course she did—of the stars, the constellations, the meteor shower, of everything soaring above, with and without purpose. "It's what binds us all, you know. This midnight sky, all this cosmic stuff. It's important to know the names of things, or at least, well you know… the name or what they want to be called." And Pudd, playing student but also making an honest effort—for she knew what the naming of things meant—had said, "well if there's Orion's belt, then there's Orion, dude beltless and without pants, wagging his dude-wand all over this sky." And how Violet had laughed at that. And how Pudd wished she could have recorded the swing and percussion of her sister's vocal music.
Pudd looked up. The late August sky was blue and cloudless. What would be soaring up there tonight?
"Pudd, Pudd—holy shit, Pudd! Look it—look! We're rich! Look at all these berries! Mmm, mmm, royal purple flavor. We shall feast." Pudd stiffened. It’s true—the berries were more purple than blue. Darker than blue. Bolder. Purple: the color of majesty. She slowly turned toward Baron, her face first in faux-shock before she mouthed, you just swore, and then, just as slowly, she smiled, wide dimpled. When her lips parted, she grinned. Swiftly and deftly—as if it were the most natural motion, the most obvious next step for her to make—she then pivoted her heels, placed her palms flat together—as if in salutation, as if in prayer—raised them above her shoulders, and jumped. And all the way down past the cliff face, the only thing she heard, if she heard anything at all beyond the rush of wind, was the sound of the flatulent ketchup bottle, all the long way down before the expected splash, before the pond accepted her, before the bath of water welcomed her in.
It was 82 degrees in Maine, but the humidity wasn't there to make the jump easy. There was a breeze. A clip of wind that knocked the pitch pine: strong enough in short bursts, but not enough to blow off those stiff needles. Like me, Pudd thought. Ha, that doesn't make sense, she thought. "Like me," she whispered, but with more emphasis on the "like"—simile turned command. And she laughed.
"Pudd, quit messing around. Pudd-Puddle! Just jump." Baron. What an asshole. His head water-slicked at the shaved sides but still springy where the tight curls frocked on top. Baron Von Shammy Cloth, Pudd thought. What were those made out of that you could get them wet and still they'd just bead the water, pill it at a holy center? Ha, so much like Baron. Asshole.
"Hey Asshole!" Pudd yelled. "I could jump, land right on you. So back off, Baron Von Blowhard!" She saw him laughing. Dork. His laugh was more like a squeezed giggle. He'd start with a bark of sound, but then it was like his lungs gave in and he'd just wheeze. Like after the initial fart of the ketchup bottle and then afterward it's all wheezy spurts.
Pudd looked back over the edge. Thought of three—was it three now?—years ago when she and Baron and her older sister, Violet, camped out on the eastern edge of the pond, where the rocks formed a pier over the water just three feet up, made a landing you could more easily slip then swim into. They had cooked vegetarian hotdogs (for Baron) with a tiny fire on the granite. Cracked themselves up with the flatulent ketchup bottle. "That might be how I sound out my mouth, but that's how you sound out your butt!"
Classic Baron. His jokes were less jokes than they were honest observations. And Baron never ever swore. Pudd once asked if he had religion. "You religious? Pray to some dude-god with exposed chest? Why do they all have exposed chests, those dude-gods? Hair or whatever headdress flowing? Always dudes, always flowing." She thought then and now and still, every picture of a god, no matter the god or religion, every image, whether on candle, t-shirt, or flag, or on their neighbor Ellen Weymouth's living room wall, had their chests slightly revealed and flowing material above their heads—hair, fabric, flowers, feathers, rays of light, whatever—always flowing. Baron would simply shrug. Pudd never pushed it, not for lack of wanting to annoy, but for lack of any real interest in the subject. And Baron never pushed any belief on her, thank god.
Ha, Pudd laughed. As if reading her thoughts (he did that sometimes, it seemed), Baron yelled, "Believe in yourself, O-Mighty-Puddle!" Followed by more ketchup flatulence. Pudd cracked up, almost stumbled too far forward. This was not the place to belly flop or falter and stumble, abuse the water so it abused you. Shit, how can he not be cold yet? They'd been at the pond for what seemed like hours, meandering on the perimeter trails before hiking over to the southern edge where the cliff was. Baron hadn’t hesitated. He jumped into the pond once they made it to the top. Baron had already jumped earlier that summer and several times since. But it was too early then for Pudd. Too soon. The humidity was there though, during all of June, July, most of August—was there most of the summer. Hot. Sultry.
"The night was sultry." She and Baron had watched Throw Momma from the Train countless times. Discovered the movie one day years ago, and the dialogue became code for them at school. Whenever they wanted to signal something that needed to be said but they didn't want the other kids to know? One of them would whisper, "the night was sultry," and they'd later meet up and laugh about their wit, often forgetting what the coded message was meant to reveal. Kids didn't know what to think of Pudd at first—she was from Minnesota and called herself Pudd instead of Rose, Rosie, or even Bud—and Baron was liked well enough, but pretty much dismissed by everyone as being Mainer trailer-poor and fantasy-LARPer-nerd-boring. They teamed up the fall of third grade and spent most of that winter watching movies from the public library and playing them on the old DVD player in Violet's room.
"Rosebud Pudd!!" Baron yelled again before dipping underwater. "R O S E . . . PUDD!" He yelled, slow then fast, when he emerged again. Again, like he read her mind. We watch too many movies, Pudd thought. Her sister, Violet, had a favorite: Blue Velvet. "You wouldn't get it," she had once told her. But Pudd knew she was just trying to goad, hook her, get her interested. Violet loved to mold young minds and saw in Pudd's the deepest, most binding of clay. "So, what's it about . . . a horse?" Violet loved horses, so the mistake was a logical one. Violet laughed. Not like how Baron laughed, but with an elegant, sparrow song that became a deep guttural guffaw. God, Pudd loved her laugh. God, everybody did. God, how she missed her. Fucking god and gods—flowing hair, chest exposed or otherwise—how everybody did.
"Rosepudd, I'm a freezin'—just jump. The force, the gods—is, are, what?—I hate English class—are with you!" Baron again, reading her mind again. How he did that. And he didn't hate English class—he loved to read and write, well mostly read—but he hated grammar. Violet would try to teach them during the summers, give them brief lessons on how to tell a story and the importance of verb tense, down by the pond. The story part was the best part. They'd tell jokes as periodic sentences and then the challenge was, "now make the punchline, that final clause—how it all ends—matter." Violet. Always with the added meaning—the apparent subject, the deeper subject. Always with the layers. Always, always something better beneath it all if you just kept working, kept scrubbing away.
"OK, how about this. I'll do it, I mean, I'll jump with you. Same time. Twinsies. Partners in leaping—Lords of Leaping," Baron said. He had climbed back up the face of the small cliff. Used the swinging rope to heft his scrawny frame over the last boulder, the one bearded with blueberries. "They're serviceberries, Rosebud," Violet had said, “Serviceberries." It took her forever to call her Pudd, the name Pudd kept after so many years of mispronouncing it herself, said the B as P: Rosepudd. "I'd rather be a pudd…puddle of water than a bud of, what? Bud is gross. Like a ripe blossom. Like an orb. Like being stuck and pregnant—infected with something about to burst or flower and flower. Or like, like it's more simple: hey there, bud-buddy-friend. It's like the early version of bro or brah: nah, brah, nah, bud. I like Pudd. I mean, I'm ok with it." And finally, Violet, in those last few months, had called her Pudd. Three months before she slipped, before she fell, before she hit her head and took in all the water, not from this pond—their favorite place, the place she'd take Pudd and Baron to swim and learn stories and grammar and the names of berries, and not from any lake or ocean or any natural body of water—but from a fucking bathtub, a large gleaming one with jets and a coastal window view. And Pudd had responded to her sister finally calling her by her chosen name with, "Thank you, oh wise Violet, oh flower of delicate floating petals." Pudd knew she could be a jerk sometimes. But being a jerk without consequence was just being a kid.
She turned toward Baron. "I think I'm too cold. Maybe another day. Maybe I'll jump next week. School's only a half-day." Summer was ending. They'd start ninth grade. High school. Violet would be in her second year of college, had she had a first year. Had she not fallen before the summer after her last year of high school. Had she only gone to the pond and jumped and swam and started summer like they always had there in Maine, and years before that in Minnesota. Had she not chosen to work, to clean homes, to stay within them, readying them for the summer season. Homes with bathtubs big enough to be baptized in. Summer always did begin with water, with diving in. With a jump, not a fall. With a decisive pivot of the heels and dovetailing of the hands, arching of the back, and a wanted splash, an anticipated one. With the baptism of the cold water of a lake, river, ocean, or pond.
Pudd hadn't swum for two years. Hadn't soaked in a tub. Hadn’t allowed her body to be adrift or immersed in water. She showered, of course, and once told Baron, "I accept my name as Pudd because I designed it, but I won't become Mud-Pudd." So, she showered. But the pond, the quarry, the lake with all the ghost-dead, stone-carting ponies, she avoided. Too cold. Too windy. Too fucking full of water, Baron Von Asshole. And Baron would always just laugh in his light, angelic way.
"Hey, I'll jump with you, " he repeated, catching his breath. "But we can also just go next week or later, whenever later might be. Maybe even in a few minutes, should you want to go together now." He found a flat spot on a neighboring rock. "I'll sit right here, Puddle, next to our Puddle." Pudd smiled and turned back toward the ledge. The water was calm. The wind had faded, and the sun's intensity had begun to soften as it inched and inched below the tree line.
One night that final year, she and Violet came down to the lower rocks to watch the meteor shower in the late winter, early spring sky. Violet knew the names—of course she did—of the stars, the constellations, the meteor shower, of everything soaring above, with and without purpose. "It's what binds us all, you know. This midnight sky, all this cosmic stuff. It's important to know the names of things, or at least, well you know… the name or what they want to be called." And Pudd, playing student but also making an honest effort—for she knew what the naming of things meant—had said, "well if there's Orion's belt, then there's Orion, dude beltless and without pants, wagging his dude-wand all over this sky." And how Violet had laughed at that. And how Pudd wished she could have recorded the swing and percussion of her sister's vocal music.
Pudd looked up. The late August sky was blue and cloudless. What would be soaring up there tonight?
"Pudd, Pudd—holy shit, Pudd! Look it—look! We're rich! Look at all these berries! Mmm, mmm, royal purple flavor. We shall feast." Pudd stiffened. It’s true—the berries were more purple than blue. Darker than blue. Bolder. Purple: the color of majesty. She slowly turned toward Baron, her face first in faux-shock before she mouthed, you just swore, and then, just as slowly, she smiled, wide dimpled. When her lips parted, she grinned. Swiftly and deftly—as if it were the most natural motion, the most obvious next step for her to make—she then pivoted her heels, placed her palms flat together—as if in salutation, as if in prayer—raised them above her shoulders, and jumped. And all the way down past the cliff face, the only thing she heard, if she heard anything at all beyond the rush of wind, was the sound of the flatulent ketchup bottle, all the long way down before the expected splash, before the pond accepted her, before the bath of water welcomed her in.
Sept / Oct 2023
Michelle Menting writes poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. Her recent work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Passages North, EcoTheo Review, About Place Journal, Tar River Poetry, SWWIM, and other publications. She lives in rural Maine.
Art: Cam Pietralunga. The Time I Tripped and Dropped All My Stuff. Acrylic on canvas.