On Friday, the lake froze over.
It was cold. It was clear. It was covered in fine, fine, fine snow that had drifted from the shoreline. And she saw that and thought it was nice, it was nice, it was very nice.
Spring came, and the lake thawed. Mud flowed and frogs croaked and green scum filled the shallows.
But she remembered, and she longed, and one long hot day when the mosquitoes were fierce and the air was smug and thick she couldn’t stand it anymore and she walked down to the shore and held the lake by its bank, by its hand, and she drew the ice up from the far shore on, thick as maple sugar and twice as sweet. It was as cold and beautiful as she remembered, and she went to sleep and dreamed of it and was almost shocked to find it still there when she awoke.
She kept it like that all day long. She kept it like that all summer long. When someone finally found her down by the water as the leaves began to turn it wasn’t hard for them to put two and two together, especially when she didn’t deny anything. Why would she?
So they put her in the lake. They had to smash a hole first, because it was still very frozen, but they were angry and determined and had time. They demanded answers, apologies, anything, and she gave them nothing all the way ‘till the end, when they threw her in and closed the sky up behind her.
She closed her eyes and did the thing that was neither floating nor sinking, and she took the opposite of a breath, and nothing changed for a v
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y
***
long time later, someone came knocking.
Tap, tap.
Tap, tap.
Tap, tap.
They were knocking on the ceiling. They were knocking on the sky.
She didn’t ignore them, because ignoring them meant she would acknowledge them and that wasn’t necessary. They sank into the background that was the foreground that was the lake that was everything; saturating her.
Tap, tap.
Except there being a ‘her’ was already a change. She hadn’t been her for a very long time, and the moment she realized that and tried to reverse it, to sink back down again was the moment she was doomed to waking, even before the saw fell from above and smacked her right in the head, removing a sizable patch of skin and bruising her very very badly.
“SHIT!” she shouted, and the moment she did that was the moment she forgot how to do the opposite of breathing.
***
When she was done coughing there was a concerned face watching her attached to an unconcerning body and they’d pulled her half-out of the hole in the ice. Half-out of the water. Half-into the sunlight. Every muscle in her body tensed rigid, then flexed.
“NononononononNO,” said the stranger. “No! It’s okay! You’re not coming out! You’re fine! PLEASE don’t do that again!”
“Do what again?” she asked sepulchrally. She could still feel the lakewater inside her, running down her vocal chords, rattling in her lungs, leaking out of her pores; every instance of its existence a moment of flight. It was leaving her behind.
“The thrashing and the screaming and the biting.”
“I bit?”
“You bit me, you bit the ice, you tried to bite the damned sun. Please don’t do that.”
Her mouth tasted like metal, which was another thing she hadn’t thought about until now that was stuck in her head and never leaving again, like a big invisible tumour. “I promise not to bite the sun,” she said.
“Try. Promise not to TRY to bite the sun either.”
She hadn’t noticed she’d done that and she hadn’t meant to do that and there was therefore no reason at all for her to feel so caught-out and ashamed about it. “I promise not to try to bite the sun, either,” she said sulkily.
“Thank you. Can I ask your name?”
“No,” she said with some relief. THAT, at least, wasn’t coming back.
“Is that your-”
“It isn’t.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m-”
“Strange,” she interrupted. “You’re strange.”
“You jumped out of a hole in the lake, drowning, then refused to leave it.”
“You dropped a saw on my head.”
“It wasn’t on purpose!”
“Why would anyone drop a saw into the lake?”
“I was trying to make a hole for ice-fishing!”
She knew ice. She knew fishing. She didn’t know what they meant when you put them together.
“Tell me about ice fishing,” she demanded.
“You make a hole in the ice and you fish through the ice. It takes a very long time and it’s very cold, so it’s a good excuse to drink and eat warm things. Can I have my saw back? I’m sorry to be so blunt, it’s just that I borrowed it from my mother and she’s going to kill me if I don’t return it properly.”
She considered this. On the one hand the saw had hurt her head, shaken her entirely from what she was and who she wanted to be and made her infuriatingly aware, and was wanted for entirely selfish reasons. On the other hand, there was no other hand.
“Grovel and beg,” she decreed.
“I’ll share the food with you!”
Oh no. Now she’d remembered food. “Give me the food.”
“I mean, I’ll share it with you when I’ve caught it.”
“You won’t catch anything,” she scoffed. “The fish aren’t dumb enough to bite a hook and a string that just sit there in the water.”
“Hungry fish are dumber fish. And the fish here must be REALLY hungry.”
“Why?”
“Because this lake’s been frozen forever. Don’t you know that? You live in it.”
“I don’t live in it,” she said with the fast assurance of someone saying something so fundamentally true that they don’t even have to consider the denial.
“Okay. Watch.”
She watched. It was okay. And then as she watched and it was okay and she watched and it was okay and she watched and it was OKAY she felt the faint stirrings of something truly incomprehensible to her.
“I think I’m bored,” she said with dawning horror.
“That’s part of it.”
“No, no, no. I can’t be BORED. I was happy!”
“Whoops, felt a tug!”
“Why would wait what?”
A lunge, a surge, a heave, a pull, some swearing, and one good hard yank and a fish flew out of the water and landed on top of her, which she resented vocally.
“Sorry. Here, one second, let me get this thing gutted: we can probably catch a second one with his insides, and I don’t know about you but I’m damn hungry.”
“I can gut it myself,” she said. And she was so vexed she did it bare—handed, and even stopped at the guts instead of wringing the fish from the fins up to everything.
“We should probably start the fire. Do you want to do that or do you want to keep fishing for number two?”
“Two,” she said, and took the rod without asking and sat there and prepared to once again battle the strangest sensation she’d relearned yet.
She wasn’t as bored for as long or as hard as she’d thought she’d be. There was still trickles of bright red coming from the fresh bait when she hauled it out of the water, its would-be-consumer still grimly hanging on. She bludgeoned it to death ambivalently.
“Fire’s up. Do you want to help cook?”
The heat felt strange. It made her fingers tingle.
“No,” she said. But she scooched closer to it, and when the fish was done cooking she learned how to eat again, and when it was done she felt warmer still, and stranger. She laid on her back on the ice and realized her feet were all that were still in the water, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that or anything else that had happened. She was too restless to sit still and she couldn’t keep her eyes open.
“I’m going to go back to sleep,” she announced.
“You sure? There’s lots more to see up here. I was about to make tea.”
Tea sounded interesting, and it took time to brew, and by the time it had been made and talked over and drunk she was even more tired and restless and so instead of announcing herself she simply slid back into the lake and sank, like a stone, like the saw had, and for a beautiful moment everything was still and calm.
Oh.
She threw the saw out of the hole and watched with some satisfaction that it bonked off the stranger’s head.
“Now we’re even,” she shouted up. But all that came out were bubbles, and she shut her eyes feeling frustrated and unable to tell why.
***
A pebble fell between her eyes.
It was smaller and softer and rounder than the saw, but it hit the spot on her forehead that was bare of skin and sore of touch and so when she came up she was already pretty angry, and seeing the stranger looking down at her made her angrier, and then finally she burst up and out of the depths with great irritation and agony and landed on them with both hands and feet.
“You!” she said.
“Me!”
“Why are you BOTHERING ME.”
“I thought we could try skating.”
She looked at the little bladed shoes with great distrust. “Try what?” she asked.
“You slide around on them.”
“I’d have to leave the lake.”
“You’re out of the lake already.”
Oh.
Oh.
She looked down her legs and saw her bare feet dripping on dry ice, drying droplets all that were left to link her to where she’d been. The air was immense and razor-thin and all-enveloping and it was trying to get inside her, to inflate her lungs. She could breathe and it meant she couldn’t breathe.
So she looked at the skates again instead. They already seemed nice.
“Show me,” she said.
Ten minutes later, when she was done laughing, she took her own turn at them.
“You’re not very good at this,” she said as she budged and nudged and skidded.
“We’re in sort of a bumpy spot,” said the stranger crossly. “I’m fine on flat ice.”
“Well, where’s flat?”
“Over there a ways?”
“Fine.”
It was flatter, but not flat. And so was the next spot they found, and the next, and to a great degree most of what was being done wasn’t skating but it was tripping, slipping, cursing, insulting, and general arguing and disgruntlement, and she’d never been so pleased to be short of her gruntles in all her life.
She wasn’t sure how long her life was. Did she count the years in the lake? If she hadn’t been alive then, what else had she been?
“I’m tired,” she realized, and decided, and announced.
“Me too. The sun’s almost down.”
“Oh.” So it was. She’d barely paid attention to it since she’d tried to eat it; a defense mechanism, maybe. But she supposed it looked low and that made sense and she felt that tiredness again, that fidgety urge to sit down and never stop moving all at once. Even the long trip back to the little windbreak where they’d eaten the fish wasn’t enough to wear it off.
She had trouble fitting through the hole.
“I’ll bring the saw back again tomorrow and cut it bigger for you.”
“Why’s it smaller?”
“It’s freezing over again.”
“Oh,” she said. Of course it was.
She went back down to the bottom before she had to think about what she thought about that.
***
This time she saw the sunlight shift and came out of the ice before the pebble could be dropped, caught it in midair, and flicked it back.
“Ow!”
“Exactly. Serves you right.” She shook herself and the water clinging to her flew everywhere. “What are we doing today?”
“I wanted to show you something.”
“Is it a long way away?”
“Not SO long.”
“Can we skate to it?”
A terrible sigh. “Yes.”
They skated to it, which made it take longer but involved a lot of shoving.
The shoreline wasn’t as muddy as she remembered. Up on the banks there was green growing in a million shades.
“It’s warm,” she said, and was surprised that this surprised her.
“It’s not winter.”
“But the lake’s frozen,” she said. And then, because she’d only just remembered it and felt very foolish, “I froze it. On purpose.”
“Why’d you do that?”
It hadn’t been for ice fishing. Or for skating. And she was sure that at the time it hadn’t been so she could do something much deeper and stranger than sleep.
“I think that I thought it was pretty,” she said. “And I missed it.”
She looked at the shoreline again. “This is pretty too. I don’t know if I missed it. But this is pretty too.”
“Do you want to try it?”
She’d been completely dry and hadn’t noticed until now. That was what made up her mind.
One foot, then the other. Soft under her heels and toes, but more springy than slimy.
She closed her eyes, breathed in cool solid white, breathed out clean warm water. She opened them, and walked onwards.
***
She looked back once, to make sure she was being followed. The lake was blue in the center now, spreading out through the ice in a thousand thousand little streams. That decided something for her.
“I’m going to see a river,” she told them. “I’ll visit afterwards.”
“I’ll make tea.”
“And then we can go fishing. Without ice.”
They agreed on that.