Hello and welcome to the fourth installment of whatever this is. This week I wanted to return to my passion of writing gorgeous gorgeous prose for gorgeous gorgeous girls. I hope you enjoy this short story. Please subscribe if you feel inspired, and feel free to share with your friends or your enemies.
The shoreline glimmered that evening, like it so frequently does, in fractalized echoes of the retreating sun from just beyond the backlit mountains. We always knew there was something mystical about the lake; our elders told us stories of its magic, of the tree that seemed to rise forever and stretched its roots on every shoreline making ripples in the Earth. In turn, we crafted mythologies of our own: that the tree, our Guardian, was a direct line between the lake and heaven; that the cicadas crying out into the night would one day turn to loved ones’ voices when they had no words left to speak. The water has a cadence to it that we swore we’d spend our lifetimes learning to decipher.
I recall, not without a trepidatious sting, an evening spent by firelight twenty paces from where the docile ripples tap at the shore. You and I clutched our nighttime coffees to our chests in bewildered silence at the day’s events. Earlier that day a pontoon plane had failed to pull back its tires on landing and had caught the water, bringing it to the water with a stentorian shriek. The first responders, a small group of fishermen, rushed over and rescued two passengers, a girl and her mother. The pilot died on impact and the father, bleeding and entangled in cargo and gear, bellowed out his love before the rising waters overtook him. We wondered, in our own young minds, what would become of them – if those souls were now bound eternally to the water, if the agony and panic of their final moments would taint the very atoms of it. We wondered what serene scenes they might see from that final resting place; how sunlight seems to act like rain as it stains the world below. Would the sunfish take a curious approach and bite chunks of flesh from those unfamiliar faces? How long would it take for a body to dissolve in our freshwater home? We didn’t dare dip a toe for eleven days after that, for fear that we might disturb them.
Two years later you called me to tell me that your father had died. You met me in a quiet clearing that overlooked the lazy waves with a gilded urn and a bottle of bottom-shelf liquor. You were still so uncomfortable with death, furious with it. We took turns throwing swigs of fire back and tossing ash into the evening wind. “He would have wanted this”, you told me, “even after he turned angry”. That’s the trouble, isn’t it – everyone seems to be turning angry and we don’t know how to fix it. We danced to melodies imagined and laid out upon the summer breeze. I met your eyes that day for the second to last time and held you close to me, that flannel I wore still carries your scent and remembers the taste of your tears.
I don’t know what beckoned me back to the lake. I’m sure it was the season growing feeble or a wayward headline that made me think of you, but for the first time since my childhood I felt complete certainty. I listened to the tall grass skittering ‘neath the almond sun as it readied itself to turn magnificent. I took a pocket knife from and carved our names into one of the Guardian’s mighty toes where they would remain, etched into the boundary between heaven and Earth, etched into the Universe itself. At the first cicada’s cry I lined my pockets with stones and strode from the shore into the shallows and into the underneath.
The final time I met your eyes I did not speak. You stood with your family on the beach with a candle flame billowing in your right hand. You stopped trying to reignite it on its second expungement and gathered your things when the chill of dusk started growing stronger than you cared to ignore.
The shoreline still glimmers like that, like it did, from above and from below at every hour, and there are so many of us here waiting. Waiting for the world to be free from its anger… Waiting for the day that we can speak and be understood.