We
Walked into the Lake
by Alex Smith
When Feather and Nikki
got to the lake, they knew it would be cold. “It’s
gonna be cold, guys,” They said in unison, dangling
their bare feet in the shallow waters.
They knew it would be
cold because the night was cold. The lake was cold.
All this chilliness and not enough long underwear.
This was why we walked into the lake.
We walked into the lake.
It was chilly in the lake. There were shards of ice
in the lake, in the sky. There, in the lake, we were
cold. I squeezed my hands. My teeth chattered. Our
bodies went the color of the water. The lake began
to eat us.
This all made sense because
Nikki was the first in. Her bathing suit was like
ice, and her nipples were hard. She was skinny and
small like a TV-star. Her face was frozen. Her skin
was perfect, there was a birthmark on her back shaped
like Italy. I was in love with her.
The lake was good to
us all in the summer. It was surrounded by the forest,
which surrounded our house, which was on the outskirts
of campus. When the snow came, we needed the lake.
The snow was cold and the winter was lowering our
morale, we needed the lake.
The walk to the lake
almost killed two of us. We were all in our bathing
suits, and some totally naked. We passed great looming
oaks, icicles hanging from their empty branches. The
birds had all flown south, we were alone with the
snow and the ground and the ice.
Feather and Takashi stopped.
They began to shake. They told us that they were too
cold.
“Well then go back,”
I had said, looking at Nikki.
She glanced at me. “George
is right. If you’re too cold then turn back. I’m walking
to that fucking lake if it kills me.” She was in love
with me. Her face was frozen. Her face was frozen
through and through. I had fallen in love with that
bored stare she always wore.
Feather and Takashi,
both in red speedos, frowned. They knew they had been
beaten, so they shook their heads in disagreement,
and kept walking. We knew the journey itself wouldn’t
kill us. The forest would protect us.
The lake was good and
welcoming. The lake was good and fat and wet. The
water would be thick like Nyquil and the floating
ice would gather around our waists as we waded in.
Some didn’t understand this. They walked nonetheless.
Nikki’s hair was wet
before we were even in the lake. It shined black against
the snow. I could see my breath. This was a movie.
“I think you should cover up,” I told her, rubbing
her arms as we walked.
“Don’t touch me.” She
said, she told me I would damage her skin, “I’ve already
got hypothermia.”
“Oh,” I said. And perhaps,
if I knew what hypothermia was, I would have felt
it too. My stomach turned and my nose was floating
on my face. We were all so cold. And I was in this
movie. Nikki and I were lovers in this movie.
We all stopped for a
cigarette. Their red eyes reflected off the trees
as we leaned. I could feel sores on my shoulders and
feet. The ground was covered in snow.
I rubbed my thighs; my
bathing suit clung tightly to my knees. This all made
perfect sense. I twisted my upper body to look at
Nikki. Her skin was glowing. Her lower lip was bleeding
a little. It had dried and cracked in the middle.
“I wish I had some Chap Stick, Nikki.”
“So do I,” she said,
rolling her eyes. Her cigarette was stained with blood.
“We should ask the cigarette
man to give you another.” I said, shaking a hand at
her cigarette.
“No.” She said.
Nikki was pretty, beautiful.
The lake was close. We
would be there in minutes. We would plunge into the
lake. The lake would be welcoming; it would let us
play and frolic like it had in the summer. I would
kiss Nikki.
We would hold each other,
or maybe not hold each other- her hypothermia. But
we would kiss. I would taste the blood from her lip,
and she would be slightly embarrassed. But this would
be love. A movie. Even better than a movie. Love.
Yes, love. And me. And
Nikki.
The water was cold. But
we walked into the lake. The boys were shriveled and
the girls were shriveled. But we walked into that
lake, the twenty of us. We needed this feeling.
We walked into the lake.
We were submerged to our chests. Some stopped early
on. Takashi stopped way back, “I can’t feel my legs
anymore, man,” he cried. Some cried. I cried a little.
The moon lit our faces, the crags of ice near the
center were dark. We kept moving. I kept following.
Nikki, her shoulders
underwater, kept walking down and down. I followed
her, the back of her head inciting rebellions of drunken
happiness in me, the floating ice blocking my nostrils.
We walked into the lake.
Our responsibilities were cleansed. We existed, bodies
upon bodies, earth upon earth, our forms displacing
the ice, the frozen fish. We existed as the lake existed,
we were one with the lake.
In soft-focus, our minds
were like reels of film, constantly recording our
own movies. The lake would be our projectionist. The
back of Nikki’s head. These abstractions would be
unified: Nikki and I, our rabid libidos, rushing over
stones like rivers, like water. Our sensuous potential
would be immortalized by the lake. We were like petrified
wood; on and on, infinitely washed of our desires
on the shore of a beach with no borders.
