They said it wasn’t safe
The
water in the lake was black, even on sunny days, and there were devils. They
are different from fish: if the poison spreads, they can dive to the bottom and
hide, or they can wrap their belongings in bits of cloth and seaweed, dig into
the earth and move to a safer country. But on that day, they floated close to
the surface, and Natasha and I floated above them on big logs. There must have
been a sawmill nearby, because there was a hoard of logs just where the river
entered the lake. We ferried the sun on our backs across the dark water.
My
dog’s head was like a seal’s; she panted and chewed on small fish. Natasha’s
log drifted beside me, and we talked slowly the way you do in water. Our
bellies were hidden by the warm logs, so to the devils we looked like tree
creatures with splashing legs. They didn’t mind us. In June, they lure
particles of light and gather them in old cans. I let go of the log and dove
in, and their gossiping was around me like echoes of huge frogs, and, trapped
in the seaweed below, were limp things that beckoned.
I
pulled out the first shimmering one and called for Natasha to join me. We
dragged them onto the shore, leaving the dog, the devils, and the logs to their
own business. We lay them out: a few arms, three legs, other bits, all shivery,
in what little space was left beside the nettles. We crouched next to them,
stripped the tinfoil off our sandwiches, and waited for a small cloud to pass.
The dog came sniffing and we patted her and threw her a stick to get her go
back into the lake.
‘What do you think they are?’ My hands were
all muddy from that stick and I wiped them on the towel.
‘Might be men’, she said ‘they’re big’.
If it was someone else, they’d
giggle, and make some joke about my future husband, but Natasha just tossed the
last of her crumbs into the water for the waiting fish. Mayflies came and
hovered above the limbs. And I said: ‘Shall we try for eyes?’
Eyes
are hard. They dig themselves into the sand underneath or float mid-lake in an
air bubble, but if you try to touch them, they dart off. Natasha said she’d
stay put. There was that cloud again. The cold water was after me. Every step
was a shiver. First the rocks, then the slurpy ooze. I slipped, fell head first,
swallowed the dark water, and there they were: frog-green, laughing, and beyond
the laughter, my whole bag of sadness, and beyond my sadness, a white-washed
room. I splashed after them, ran, dove in again, shouted. Next thing, I was
sprawled on my back in the mud, my dog was barking, Natasha was laughing on the
shore, and the eyes were long gone.
It
got a bit cold, and the clouds were coming in, and they’d be worried we got
kidnapped or something, so I put the heavy limbs back into the water where they
wriggled with a forgotten kind of life and swam away.
By @Roppotucha Greenberg
Originally Published in Turnpike Mag 6.
Read the full issue here: https://turnpikemagazine.com/2019/07/21/issue-no-6-1st-anniversary-july-2019/
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