Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller “Boy, Peter is what you’d call fanatical about fishing,” I commented to Cindy as we rode home from a family gathering Sunday evening. “Kind of like when you were 17, huh?” Cindy asked in more of a statement than a question. “No, I was never like that,” I said firmly. Peter and Noah fishing But Cindy’s question got me thinking to when I was Pete’s age, between my junior and senior year of high school, growing up on the Mississippi River. Almost every summer morning, my cousin Kevin and I would take his flat-bottomed boat and head to the backwaters on the Wisconsin side of the main channel. We would stump-hop, fishing the roots of dead trees. Every tree would yield a rock bass or two. By 10 o’clock, we would have a stringer of fish, which we would split. I would fry mine for lunch. Most evenings, I would go fishing in the Reno Bottoms, first for bass in the fast spillway water, then for panfish in the slough, and finally, as yellow light dimmed to dusk, fo...

David Heiller If six-year-old bodies could talk, they would have plenty to say about vacations. Take Malika’s nose. The freckles are finally starting to show through the scab there. For a while, it looked as if someone had peeled it like a banana. Swingset gymnastics at the old Brownsville school. Mollie had been performing stunts on the swings at the school grounds. She would grab the ropes and lift herself out of the swing, then rotate backwards until she was facing the ground, like a gymnast. Disaster came one afternoon when she let go while in this position. I could hear her crying a block away, where I was cutting weeds in the backyard. Her face looked like someone had hit it with a mud pie: a coat of dirt ran in a circle from forehead to chin. Her nose wasn’t broken, but oh, what a scab. Yet she was back at the park the next day. Playgrounds have a way of making you forget about a few scabs. If bodies could talk, you’d hear grumbling from Mollie’s shoulder...