Scheherazade
Remember the day we pulled the bodies out of the lake? It was a warm, sticky-green summer’s day, and the water was deathly still the way it only gets in late August, the air so hot you could feel it brush against your skin like a living thing. Clouds of mosquitoes hung over the water, buzzing, and the trees dripped in their leaves like green tendrils. The church steeple stuck up from the lake’s center, the deepest part of itself, like a white woman’s hand extended, holding out a sword. Or perhaps it was a dream. It’s a dream I’ve had many times before, so many times it’s warped past memory, if it was ever a memory to begin with. It was not the kind of lake filled with secret monsters or fairy queens. It was the kind of lake that was only full of water: unrelenting, uncaring, unfeeling. The kind of lake that was a Biblical flood. When the waters came, the horses ran and did not stop running, until night fell and they forgot they were horses and still they kept running, just legs and the memory of legs and the feeling of moving with the wind until they were becoming it. It’s not like trees, where the roots dig into the ground and draw up water and the water turns into life. It’s the opposite of that. The town is on the ground and the water is on top of it, crushing it down, and its naked roots are stretching up into the air and drawing in nothing, nothing at all. The story was this: there was a town, once, which was near a river, which was near a smaller lake, which was damm(n)ed. And one day the stones of the dam were removed one by one, on purpose, and then the water — which was the strongest thing in the world, and already straining at its boundaries to burst free — swallowed it all up, the entire thing. We pulled the bodies out of the blue-brown still water and they were not people any longer but lake-things. And their eyes were open and staring, but it wasn’t frightening, only horribly, horribly sad. Then we rolled up the rug so they wouldn’t drip onto it and dressed them in warm clothes again, dried them lovingly and brushed back their hair until it shone. The song on the radio was tinny and bright and we sliced up apples and fed them to each other, bright red slice by bright red slice. The people stayed dead, though. Now when the tide sinks low, you can see the tops of the houses emerge like ruined skeletons, dripping green and crusted with algae, full of smooth dark stones. Fish swim through them like ghosts. They have no use for walls and ceilings, or jewelry, or window frames. Meanwhile, the light breaks against our window, so brightly it hurts. Meanwhile, the song on the radio spins on but we have stopped dancing. That means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable. Tell me how this and love, too, will ruin us. And the lake with the town as its bones turns silver when the light hits it, arcs up, becomes a mirror for the grieving sky. After “Scheherazade,” by Richard Siken
Kate Turner 27
