The Lake

It was fucking cold and they were fucking crazy, but that's to be expected, for these are the trappings of a life on the edge, looking for meaning while surrounded by weirdness.  What else is there to do in the dead of winter when the warnings say that your skin will die if you are stupid enough?

Get out on that lake.

That lake so deep and sweet in those days of summer gone, refreshing no more as it's solid as solid can be, so far down that you'd need something powerful to break it, like dynamite. Walk for a while and you realize that you're now further from anyone or anything than you can get without getting out of town altogether.  And that goddamn wind is a hell of a bitch and those idiot warnings are real now and you're fucking lucky you came prepared.

There's all kinds of shit out there that suddenly comes into view out of nowhere and puzzles you until its revealed in closeness.  Is that a fucking couch?  Someone dragged a giant couch out here. That took a lot of energy.

And they just kept going, long past the point where any of them thought better of it, and none knew just how long that had been.  But then ahead was a sick green glow and it was hard to tell if it was above or below the surface of the ice until they were standing on it and it became obvious.  In the ice, somewhere deep but not too deep was some shadow in front of that glow or maybe it was just the source of it.  It played tricks on the eyes so that it never seemed the same from one moment to the next and no one could come close to nailing down what it might have been, let alone what it was.

And then the glow was gone and it was darker than they had ever seen as their eyes thirsted for what they didn't realize that they had become so accustomed to.  They looked around for a long time before the distant lights returned and they could see their own foreign selves standing around on that nothing of a landscape, freezing it seemed.  It was time to go back.

They were pretty sure that they were just fucking crazy.