Night Flower
The boulder half-submerged on the near side, large enough to crouch behind, close enough to the waterline that the ambient sound would cover anything small.
Mama is going to make me ride in the truck bed.
I pressed myself into the mud behind the boulder and became still. Real still, not just held-breath still, but the practiced kind, the kind I'd been working on since I was small enough to fit behind the linen cupboard at home and had discovered that nobody looked for what didn't announce itself. The Switch engaged at its edges, not the full suppression, just the quieting of the obvious. I let the ambient sounds layer back over me one by one: frogs first, then crickets, then the soft complai
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