He Said Turn Here

and then Tony showed us the lake where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer and it had dissolved like powder so he thought maybe the lake could take some of the radiant, aluminum kind he had been making lately. And it did. It was a perfect lake, none of the paint had chipped off, no bolts showing, the arms that Dante and Virgil would have to hack through not even breaking the surface. Mumbling Italian to itself, it had climbed down two wooden stairs back to the beach now that the rains were done. How strange to be water so close to the ocean yet the only other water you get to talk to comes from the sky. Maybe this is why it seems so willing to take on Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes his friends, which is really many different sadnesses, smaller and smaller, surrounded by more and more space, each a world and at its core an engine like a bee inside a lily, like buzzing inside the bee. It seems like nothing could change its color although we couldn’t tell what color it was, it kept changing. In the summer, Tony says he comes down early each day and there’s no one around so the lake barely says a thing when he dives in and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand, trying to drag him to safety and some nights in New Mexico, he can hear it howling, searching for him in the desert so we’re glad Tony has this lake and we promise to come back in August and swim with him across, maybe even race.