By A.P. Ritchey
Fifty years passed before I solved a small, nagging mystery from my childhood while digging through boxes of long-forgotten photos: why one summer afternoon everyone along the beach stood up, pointing toward the water with Polaroids and whirring 8mm cameras, why my father joined them, snapping away with his Instamatic, why my mother hurried me out of the surf and wrapped me in a sun-warmed towel, holding me close and rocking me back and forth, and why no one ever told me about the fin moving steadily toward the surf, where I had been bobbing up and down in chest-deep water.
I love all the rich details and the camera descriptions that put us right into a certain era!
An autobiographical moment compressed into an engaging, suspense filled run on sentence.
A clever read!
I was drawn into the scene immediately. The pacing and rhythm of the long sentence holds the tension and I didn’t see that ending coming. Well done!
That is one long sentence and it is effective. Very picturesque writing. Takes a body down to the beach.