Week 13, Theme 5

Prompt: Sentence theme. Use the sentence “she woke up outside with leaves in her mouth.”

Father would die soon. The doctors said six months at most. Karen felt the urge to make his twilight memorable; for herself, at least. She had planned for them a four-day canoe trip.

They started at Source Lake, where Father had spent the summers of his youth at camp. The family had been famous at Camp Pathfinder; Father’s uncle had made all of the cedar canvas canoes with which the campers had navigated on ambitious canoe trips through the Canadian wilderness. On that first day they had paddled by the island where the camp had been located. Karen could make out the ruins of a few of the cabins and of a larger building. She supposed that that was the dining hall, the site of the fabulous summer-end banquets that Father had so often described to her. Karen was relieved that she was in the back of the canoe and could not see her father’s face as they passed the remains of the camp.

They spent the second night on Joe Lake. Joe was the Las Vegas of Algonquin Provincial Park—that is, populated with annoying tourists and relatively dirty—but they had been forced to stop because of fatigue. During the night, Father began to scream and writhe in his sleep, like he had so many times before. Karen exited the tent and went to sit on a rock by the dark lake.

She woke up outside with leaves in her mouth. She wiped herself off and sat up to watch the water spiders skirt over the still glass of the water’s surface. “Ka…Kar…Karen?”

Karen started. How could she have left Father alone for so long? She ran in the direction of his call. When she made it to the tent and campfire, though, she found not an old man in need of her help but instead saw, for one last time, the person she had known for all of her life. Father was sitting on a log, holding out to her a metal plate with a pancake. It was formed in the shape of a heart.