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Trapped
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Victoria Wittenbrock
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ilence. The best word to describe that day. Not a tranquilizing, calming, peaceful silence. An eerie, sinister, disconcerting silence. Not in the way that one might venture outside on a Sunday morning to find that the usual noises of the hustle and bustle of the city are calmer, and there is a sense of serenity set in place by the sound of running water in the nearby creek or crickets chirping in the distance. Silence that occurs in the scene of a horror movie to generate suspense before the long-anticipated jump-scare flashes across the screen as the speakers emit a high-pitched shriek or deafening boom. Little did I know, things in my own life were about to go boom as well. My father and I sat in the living room of our condo together, just the two of us. A father-daughter fishing trip my senior year of high school. Likely our last one before I abandoned my family to travel across the country the next year to pursue my college career. I laid on one side of the couch, my father on the other, my feet stretched across his lap. I was reading a book and he was on his laptop catching up on some work. I took a brief intermission from my novel to stare aimlessly out of the window. The sky was menacingly grey with clouds. I realized to my dismay that it was still lightly raining. Not quite hard enough to elicit the typical pitter-patter sound of rain cascading onto the roof, but just hard enough to be an inconvenience. Typical mid-October weather, I thought. It was at this moment I began to ponder the peculiarity of how not even the fire was crackling like it normally seemed to. Even the monotonous clicks on my dad’s keyboard seemed gentler than usual as he typed away. Another hour or so wasted away and although the storm clouds continued to loom overhead, the rain dissipated, and the forecast seemed promising. My father and I had gotten restless; we had succumbed to the unrelenting, inescapable cabin fever. We loaded up the fishing gear and clamored into the truck, preparing to head out for a few hours of fishing in one of the streams just outside of town. We journeyed about 30 minutes or so beyond the confines of the little mountain town. We turned off the main highway onto a little mountain backroad that one of the town locals my father had become recently acquainted with told us about. The car lurched back and forth as we trudged along. In retrospect, I am in awe of how strong the suspension must have been. The sage brush along the sides of the narrow path occasionally scraped against the sides of the vehicle. Of course, my dad was more than willing to sacrifice his truck for the opportunity to snag an impressive trout. The path gradually got hairier. It started as we came across small puddles that he took extra care
