This Is Only a Test by B.J. Hollars

peeling fence. He jogged toward the fridge, peeking behind him to make sure he hadn’t been spotted. He hadn’t. No sign of him except for footprints in the sand.
    He reached for the shiny handle, pulled, listened for the sound of the door yawning open:
    Click
.
    And then, after entering inside, the sound of the door closing:
    Click
.
    The inner shelves had been removed, though it was still a tight squeeze for a boy Bobby’s size. Nevertheless, he found that if he tucked himself into the fetal position, it almost felt like a womb. Somewhere in the world beyond the confines of that fridge, the dock wobbled beneath the new weight. Bobby smiled to himself. The boy who wanted simply to hide was quite certain they’d never find him.
    Half an hour later, as the game wound down, Bobby’s prediction proved true.
    Baaaahhhhh-beeeeeee
, the counselors’ voices droned, followed by the sharper
Bob-be!
    Amidst the shouting, a maintenance man spotted the fridge on the dock and, in an uncharacteristic act, decided not to put off till tomorrow what could easily be done today. Rope in hand, he wandered toward the water, ducking beneath the paint-peelingfence as his work boots clomped toward the dock. He tied one end of a rope around the fridge and the other to the dock post.
    The fridge was meant to serve as an anchor to ensure the docks didn’t float away, and after the maintenance man double-checked his knots (“This’ll hold”), he leaned his stocky frame into the powder-blue box and knocked it into the water.
    Nobody knows what Bobby thought as that fridge bobbed twice in the lake. We can imagine, of course. How the water wiggled through the seams like eels. And how it began filling that fridge within seconds, drenching Bobby’s shoes, Bobby’s socks, Bobby’s shorts. Meanwhile, on the other side of that refrigerator door, the maintenance man wiped his hands on his sleeves and headed toward the barn. There was a lawnmower in need of tuning.
    Back on land, the counselors continued their search.
    Baaaahhhhh-beeeeeee!
they cried.
Come out, come out, wherever you are!
    A chorus of prepubescent campers soon joined them.
    Hey, Bobby! Game over! Ollie ollie oxen free!
    Inside the fridge, the water continued to rise. Past Bobby’s orange-and-gray-striped T-shirt, past his slender neck, and finally, as the wide-eyed boy ballooned his cheeks for the last time, past his mouth and nose as well. His hands reached for a handle that was not there, his fingers clawing against the smooth surface. Then, as his cheeks deflated, he just stopped clawing. Just stopped everything. The refrigerator had become a coffin, and in the coming days, as a platoon of sheriff’s deputies commandeered fishing boats and skimmed the water, nobody thought to tug on the rope pulled tight to the post of the dock. Nobody thought. Instead,those deputies took solace in the sound of their outboard motors, while Bobby—once a boy—became an anchor.
    That night, as the campers slept or tried to, the counselors snuck from their cabins, slipped beneath the paint-peeling fence, and joined the head lifeguard at the waterfront. They were all so terribly young—most of them not yet twenty—and death, for them, was still an abstraction. As they tugged their damp swimsuits over their hips the goose bumps served as proof that they were alive.
    â€œAll right, let’s link up,” the head lifeguard called, so the counselors did—locking elbows to form a chain of boys whose high-kneed march plunged their toes deep into the sand. Their toes revealed no bodies that night, but thirty feet away and ten feet below, Bobby Watson’s body responded to their ripples.
    The days passed like seasons—the seasons like lifetimes—but first, the world stubbornly continued. That week’s batch of campers returned home, while the next batch arrived soon after, dragging their trunks along the cabins’ plywood