Author's Note: This was composed for a contest at a writing sim in Second Life. The contest is called "Dash." Basically, you are given a word and have fifteen minutes to put together some poetry or prose based on the word. As I only had fifteen minutes, there were a ton of typos. I've cleaned it up and bit and decided to post. The word we were given was "barge." Let me know what you think. Thank you. Timmy paddled his canoe roughly twenty yards from the sandy shore. He dropped the drag anchor, set up his fishing rod, and baited the hook. Then he cast out into the strong current of the Mississippi just below St. Louis, where the river took a turn to the west. He opened a can of iced tea and waited for a strike. 'Whatcha fishin for?' hollered Sandy, from the riverbank. 'Catfish, but all I'm catchin' is bass n carp.' 'Comin' to the cookout later?" asked Sandy. 'Sure am.' Timmy sipped some tea, checked his line, retied his sneakers, checked his line again, popped some Trident spearmint into his mouth, and checked his line again. Then he set up some music on his iPOD and settled. He didn't have long to wait.In about twenty minutes, the low sound of the air horn cut through his headphones. Timmy checked his line again, moved the canoe to troll a bit, and then let it drift. He could see the bend in the Mississippi, tree-lined with old hardwoods, just below him turning the river west. He pulled out his binoculars and waited. The skipper of the Mathilda kept the tug in mid-channel. The gentle vibration of the two Cummins diesel turbo V-12's was relaxing on the bridge. He picked up his binoculars and scanned the bank. Sure enough, there was the boy, in his canoe, fishing and watching, as he had been the past two summers. The skipper checked the position of the two thirty-ton barges, each loaded with coal, that his tug was pushing, and smiled. Then he leaned out of the window of the bridge, waved, and blew the big air horn for the lad. Timmy waved back, and grinned.'Some day,' he said to himself, 'I will be on that bridge!'