The Glass Lake

Based On Issue #2's Prompt

They say the lake awaits the soft streak of moonlight the way a lover lost to the sea grips tightly to the memories of his girl. It is more than a matter of wishing something into being. Rather, it is likened to the desperate flash of a star as it is flung off course and sent plummeting to its demise, the world clapping in time with the fall. It is a need for order, for something familiar to grow close as all else recedes. It is the song only echoed by two, one always chasing, the other just out of reach.

They say, yet they are wrong. The lake’s longing does not come from the wish for a lover or a star’s last glimpse of the sky as it falls from its home. It is nothing so gentle as that. The lake is a creature left in fitful slumber, contained in its silence yet raging with the world trapped beneath its glassy skin. Its deepest wish is to unleash the truth contained in the watery depths, to awaken when all else falls still.

The moon is its catalyst, the key to unlock what should be left in darkness. Her silver-spun touch calls forth the reckoning, tempting with her sweet shine the person who might come and step too far. The chill she evokes against the spine is one many misinterpret as delight, noticing too late that hers is a barbed caress that seeks to entrap. They lay smoldering sage and willow switches before her, believing in a gentleness that has remained absent since the first deaths of her children, unknowing of the promise they are making.

The lake and the moon are not lovers, but accomplices, working in a harmony as dark as the nights of her exile when her light is hidden from the world and the lake is left still and unsatisfied. She is the hook, it is the hand waiting to harvest the moment it feels the touch of one too curious or foolish to walk away.

Together, they reveal to the unfortunate and few a future destined, an oath taken, and perhaps, a truth buried.

In the season of turns and wayward flocks, they sit quiet, one hungering, the other sleeping. When life buds and the crow of frogs consumes the stillness, they are at war, bitterest enemies in a pure world.

But when the night expands and unlocks her gilded cage, the moon sweeps down to carry away a man who questioned too much or a girl who believed in too little. She binds their hands with threads of scorn and delivers them to the lake’s edge. Their eyes fix upon the glass-like surface, at the tilt of the moonbeams upon its swell, and find they cannot pull away.

It is then that the lake has its fun. For the man, it reflects the river of pain trapped in the murky brown of its silt, the world as it will be once he is gone, the answers to the questions he spent so long asking, corrupted by the truth he never wished to know. The man is the usual kind, the one tortured by his own mind, swallowed easily the moment his eyes first rest on the lake. His life will not slake the lake’s hunger, merely grow it.

For the girl, there is something more. She is a child of hard edges and little light, a likeness to its own depths. For her, as for the one fated to see the same thirty years before, it reveals a past lost, a secret dredged from such dark depths that it blackens before her very eyes, ready to spill over onto her hands. No binds must capture her hands, for she gives herself freely, letting the world below wash over her as her body melds with the water, each limb disappearing without a ripple.

When the last strand of her ebony hair sinks beneath the surface, the moon turns her head away, already searching for another.

The lake waits longer, gazing down into its depths where she sinks further.

It almost wishes it could have let her go.