Creative Non-fiction by Lisa Brodsky

The text felt heavier than its few words should allow.

Kate: Please call me when you can. 

Then the follow-up.

Kate: I have a question to ask you, and I’d rather not put it in a text. 

It snagged my thoughts and wouldn’t let go. What could she possibly want to ask?
Something about our weekend trip up north, I assumed. But what required a phone call, not a message? What needed to pass through the air between voices?

I called as soon as I could.
“What’s up? Is everything okay?” I asked, my tone a shade too sharp.

“I just wanted to ask if it’s okay if Jon comes with us this weekend.” Her words were quiet, edged with hesitation, as though the request might tip something fragile.

“Of course,” I said, without pause.

“Well, I thought I’d ask, just in case it felt… strange for you.”

“No worries. I’ll make room for him in the back. Safer that way, and he can be buckled in.”

“Thanks,” she murmured. “We’ll need to stop somewhere along the way… maybe a beach?”

When I picked her up, she moved slowly, guiding Jon to the rear seat with a care that felt ceremonial. Her hands lingered in each adjustment, tucking, securing, as though she were protecting something from more than just the bumps in the road.

From the first mile north, I felt his presence behind me—quiet, steady, watchful. Every so often, I glanced in the mirror, expecting to see his face, but each time, he was just out of view.

As we drove north, the sky darkened in slow degrees. Pine branches swayed like they were whispering to themselves. Jon was quiet, but I could feel him, like a low vibration in the chest, like the way you can tell someone is standing behind you without hearing them.

Kate’s eyes stayed on the scenery, as though she could memorize every mile. When the lake finally appeared, steel blue under a restless wind, her face brightened. “Here,” she said, her voice almost breaking. “This looks perfect.”

The three of us walked together to the water’s edge. The shore was scattered with smooth stones, the air carrying the smell of cold metal and rain. 

Kate stopped a few feet from the water’s edge, the wind tugging at her sleeves, the hem of her jacket snapping lightly against her legs. The lake was restless—small, cold waves working themselves onto the sand and retreating again, like they were deciding whether to take or to give. She sat close to him, head bent, her lips moving in words I couldn’t quite catch. For a moment, her voice seemed to lift and answer itself, as though another tongue had joined the conversation. 

She lowered herself beside him, knees folding into the damp sand, one hand resting on what she’d carried all this way. Her head tilted toward him as if to catch his voice. From where I stood, it looked like they were speaking in a language made only for the two of them—a rhythm of pauses, murmurs, and silences shaped by the wind.

The air around them seemed heavier than where I stood, as if the shoreline itself was leaning in to listen. The gulls had gone quiet, their calls replaced by the hiss of water folding over itself. My eyes kept catching small movements—her hair lifting, her fingers caressing what she held in her hands, the faint shift in her shoulders as if someone unseen had touched her.

At one point, she reached down and traced something in the sand with her fingertip, an outline I couldn’t quite make out before the wind swept it away. Her breath caught, and I saw her tilt her face toward the horizon as though asking for permission.

A tear gathered at her chin, fell to the sand, darkening it like a tiny spill of ink. She opened what she’d been carrying, carefully, reverently, and let the wind lift its contents toward the waves.

The lake took him gently, the ashes vanishing into its endless surface, his presence folding into water and air. Kate’s shoulders eased, but the space behind me, even on the drive home, felt full—as if Jon still traveled with us, no longer needing the seatbelt.

*   *   *

Lisa Brodsky holds a Master of Public Health and is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at Hamline University. She was a two-time winner of the Patsy Lea Core Awards for poetry. She has numerous published poems in several literary journals, including Otherwise Engaged, 2022, The Talking Stick, and The MockingOwl Roost. Her creative nonfiction stories include “Legacies” in The Tower 2023, “A Bushel and a Peck” in Memoirist, and “Tales from a Broken Crypt” in Otherwise Engaged, 2024.