OUR LITTLE SECRET
A Short Story
by
BARBARA SCOTT-EMMETT

The day the Sandersons went home, my little sister, Maisie, and I wandered down to the shore to watch the waves break against the rocks at Peak’s Point. Neither of us said much, though we both knew an important time in our lives had come and gone. And how quickly it had gone. One day we were all playing happily together on the sand, tossing a ball back and forward, screeching louder than the gulls when the cold sea splashed us. And the next, here we were, two listless girls, aimless and sad without knowing how to voice that sadness. It felt like summer was over, though it was only late July and the warm honeyed days had not yet taken on the first chill of autumn. Maisie ran ahead and I knew she was trying to bring the fun back into the day. But I was stubborn as only a fourteen year old can be. I was sullen and distant, though I tried to pretend nothing had changed. It seemed neither of us wanted to admit how we felt: that life in Whitehaven was flat and ordinary, as we had known it would be, once the Sandersons went home.
      We reached the far end of the beach where the old bathing huts were and plonked ourselves down on the duckboard. Maisie’s cotton skirt was damp around the hem and the clinging sand made it heavy where it trailed over the edge of the boards. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and squinted at the horizon. ‘Ship,’ she said.
     I looked where she was pointing and saw the tanker in the distance, moving imperceptibly. When we looked again it would have rounded the point and disappeared. Maisie had already lost interest in it and was scuffing her sandals against a rock jutting out of the side of the boarding. The chafing sound annoyed me and the sight of her sandy knees made an inexplicable rage rise within me. ‘Stop that!’ I said, nudging her shoulder with my own. She stared at me in silent surprise for a moment, then looked away, her face crumpled. I was immediately sorry but scowled so as not to show it. We said nothing for quite a long time after that, both of us gazing into our own private distances.
     Then Maisie worried an old scratch on her elbow from the time she fell off the roundabout and said, ‘Wanna go up to the pigpen?’
     I shrugged. The ‘pigpen’ was our name for a small enclosure by the stream up near Hillman’s Farm. It was nothing really, just a clearing in the undergrowth where the ground was muddy. There was an old oil drum there that we sat on to watch the stream sparkle past. Sometimes there were sticklebacks.
     ‘Want to?’ said Maisie, brushing away a fly.
     I shrugged again. Nothing held any interest for me now, now that the Sandersons had gone.

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