Reflexion (Flash)

Story by K. MacMichael

It is not that lake. But it looks that glacial kind. It is not a hidden lake, yet it is a lake not often visited – or photographed.

There is flat reflecting water; grass; hills, mountains; further off. Sky and clouding.

You remember a door.

There is a girl. You know it is a girl, although she wears clothes a boy could wear, a dark athletic shirt with no sleeves, white piping around the neck.

Her back is long and her shoulders are strong; below, there is not enough colour and space to quite make out but denims or athletic shorts seem likely. You can see the back of a baseball cap. You can not see her face or hands; she holds them in front of her. Is she holding something on her lap with her hands?

A book. A book of midnight. But it is near noon. When you open the door, you move to light.

The girl the woman’s hands on the book are still, resting and alert as the rest of her. She is sitting on a downed tree, the tree’s skin lost long ago. She is looking at the mountains and perhaps you should be too.

Her hair is short, cut in a soft v up from the nape of her neck. You call her a girl; you know you should use the word woman, although she is young, she isn’t a child.

It is still. Her stillness holds you. Nothing breathes. No wind, low or high, no birds, no insects. There is a gloss, a quality of perfection and death. Does she breathe? Do you?

You find you can not turn away, that you are unsure of wanting to turn away. And of wanting to stay.

She must be another intruder here, where no one human belongs for long, but she is the most real thing in this

scene

screen

which you find you want to test with your fingers; yet fear shattering it with tactility. How did you get here? What is she?

What is she? No of course, who is she. Another tourist, a summer employee on her day off, a runner taking a break. She looks like she runs when she is not still. You walked here along the trial from the road. Of course you did. You must have.

There is a flicker. Lighting?

Nothing moves. This girl, this woman, this she, who watches the water hills mountains. She is not moving – the world is bending towards her. Refraction.

You do not move. There are slow oscillations, synaptics.

And suddenly you decide you can not see her face because she has no face. She has no ears no nose no mouth no eyes she only watches and she has no face.

This is not possibly true and it is most true.

You hear something. Don’t you?

A ripple, a flex, and her neck begins to turn.

You don’t know. What to do. If her blankness turns to you – will you turn to stone? Are these mountains these rocks, this land, all made of men who stared too long?

Are you a man? Were you a man before you came here?

A resonance, a sound against the drum of your ear which does not travel first through the air.

This note saves? you. It is curiosity against terror. A prelude to a prelude, the one in e minor, the one which reminds you of a funeral but others describe as romantic. It is not quite that.

Uynk

The water of the lake is still. You stare. You know this sound and do not know it.

The water is not still. Something disjoints. Again. Uynk.

Uynk

Utnk.

Asyn chronic fit fu lness building in to a pattern. You must, you must see it in front of you.

Rain?

A splash? That is not a splash. It breaks cohesion, bond, surface tension; it does not descend.

What are you? Your body sighs. You are no one. Nothing.

What you see before you is not a drop; but a rise.

A second/s flicker, a thin white glare.

The rain, instead of falling, pulls. Throws itself up from the moraine waters.

The girl reads from her book. The witch casts her spell.

In the greens of the mountains that backbone and bracket; to the tall and teasing pale and black clouds, droplets drumming in your brain; the lake floods, pours, ascend and succeeds

soon you too will flow

into the sky.