The place where I live is about to disappear. The Outer Banks will soon be sandwiched between the seashores of Morocco and North Carolina, squashed between larger landmasses. Seven days before the collision, the newscasters say, although they, along with the scientists they consult, can tell us nothing about the phenomenon. Like us, they wonder why…

Bob Sanders stood in his living room, shoulders squared to the wall upon which hung the third 32” flat screen Smart® TV Bob had owned in two years. Bob held a Wiffle bat, its knob pointed at Bob’s belly button, tip at his reflection in the powered-off screen.“Bob, I swear to God, if you break…

Let me make this clear: I didn’t want to kill that tiger. And I certainly didn’t want to kill him on stage. I loved him, but he was a dangerous old cat. White tigers always are—it’s a genetic thing. Their chromosomes are all out of line with each other and they don’t know what the hell…

There was no furniture in the cabin left to burn. It was either the floorboards or the books now, or her daughter’s toys. The floorboards were pine, the worst fuel. Pine burnt fast and left a residue in the chimney that could ignite the house if it was left to build up over time. Still, time…

Dude, dude, dude! ’Kay. No, listen, bro. You’ll love this next part.
So we were being chased by this one giant turkey thing, right? And like, this thing is fast, ’kay?

Like: Holy. Shit.

And it’s like scary even, like, I know it’s a bird and all, but it has these teeth, man, and this big red face, and dude, it was huge. Like, no joke, it could sit on your house. Had these really gay feathers though, like multicolored and shit.

Anyway man, I’m fucking booking it, and just dragging Lucy, and she’s screaming, like, “Oh my God, we’re going to get eaten by a T-Rex, Shawn, you fucking jerk!” Like all hysterical you know? So I’m like, Luce, that’s a fucking turkey, I’ve seen Jurassic Park, ’kay? I should know.

By the way, turns out: I was wrong. I checked when I got back. T-Rex had feathers! Did you know? Yeah, and they lived in the Cretaceous, bro, not the Jurassic period. It’s like a whole ’nother period.

So anyway we’re getting chased by this giant turkey T-Rex thing, fucking ruining my childhood with its big gay feathers, and we get to like, a fuckingcliff, right? So I’m like, “Fuck you, turkey, I’ve been mountain climbing since I was eight!” So I just climb down the side of the cliff, and me and Luce are just hanging there like—

Dude, what do you mean? Were you even listening, brah?

Ugh! ’Kay, like I said, we had those mushrooms— Yeah! The ones from the hobo- shaman-drug dealer I’ve been buying from! He said they would take us back in time, but he’s always saying crazy shit like that, so I wasn’t too concerned about it, you know? They were like, way more expensive than the regular kind, though, so I figured they’d be pretty good. So yeah, put them on a pizza so Lucy would get high too, you know, ’cause she doesn’t do drugs? Yeah, it bums me out man, ’cause we got nothing else to do when we’re not fucking, like, all she talks about is her science-y shit. Should never have moved in with that bitch.

Anyway, we ate the pizza at this romantic picnic in the forest I planned out for her—shut up bro, she was having a rough week with school and shit. Whatever, man…that’s not the point. I offer you an epic, real life adventure story, with like, crazy shit happening, and you give me shit ’cause I was treating my lady to a romantic picnic? Fucking Indiana Jones didn’t have to deal with this shit when he was, like, romancing the stone, or whatever. (Shut up, I know those were two different movies.)

Anyways dude, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, we ate magic shroom pizza in the forest, and start tripping balls, like, instantly. Everything starts to get all bright and shit, and the trees just start to change into these tropical things—palm trees! Yeah, into fucking palm trees, man, and like, it was warmer too, you know? So like, we walk around in this weird tropical place, and we hear this whoosh noise above us. Lucy screamed sooo hard haha, you have no idea! For realz though, I was pretty freaked myself. It was like this giant bat flying over us or something. Turns out it was a pterosaur. Yeah, I looked up a bunch of shit when I got back, man. Like, did you know they didn’t even have cavemen in dinosaur times? No wonder we couldn’t find help, yo!

So yeah like I was saying, we’re walking in this jungle place, totally freakin’ high—but no, actually, we were just in the past. But it still felt like I was high though, ’cause of everything being all weird and different. I mean, no wonder there was no people back then, they probably just died from tripping out so hard every day, just from looking at all these weird birds and shit! Dinosaurs. Whatever.

So that’s when we hear this really weird gobbling sound behind us, and like, I turn around and there it is, this fucking giant turkey T-Rex looking at us with its head on one side all confused and shit and making those turkey noises. I was just like, whoa, the fuck is that thing? Fucking giant turkey!

Well no, actually it looked more like a parrot or something with the colored feathers and all but it sounded like a turkey. Also the big red face was like a turkey. At first I couldn’t stop laughing, ’cause it was so weird, you know? And ’cause I still thought we were tripping. But Lucy really freaked the fuck out that time and so we started running, and fuck, it could run. Like it just started chasing us. It was still fucking gobbling though, and bobbing its head like a pigeon or something while it ran, or like a chicken.

So we get to that cliff and—dude! Dude, this is the best part! No you’re not, you’re fucking texting Sarah again. I’m not blind, bro!

Dude, I don’t care what happened to you this weekend. Don’t you get it? I traveled through the dimensions of time, bro, and fucking walked with the fucking dinosaurs. I killed a pack of velociraptors with a spear! What? No, Lucy made the spear, do I look like a fucking caveman to you? You think I know how to make a spear? I just used it to kill the raptors, dude. I didn’t tell you that part? Oh man, trust me, you’ll want to hear this.

First of all. The raptors in J-Park? Not actually raptors. They were this other thing from the actual Jurassic, I think. In real life raptors are like these tiny bird things—well, just a bit smaller than in J-Park, but still pretty freaky, especially in a pack. They’re about the size of a dog, but more nimble, and really fast and vicious, man. Like a pack of giant crows or something, but with teeth, like razor sharp teeth, and those giant claw things on their feet. Yeah, that part of the movie was real. Check it out, dude, they totally clawed me here, see the scar?

’Kay, ’kay, ’kay, but…so anyway, we were just chilling in our little hut thing that we built— well, Lucy built—and… Yeah, it was pretty cozy, actually, we had, like, a fire pit in the middle and it was kinda under a rock and out of the way so no one would see us, but still had a bunch of light and shit, so we were good, you know? Like we had a nice home there for a little while—

Whatever, dude, like stop interrupting me.

So we were all like…we were going at it, you know? Like pretty intense, if you ask me. I dunno bro, it’s like, something about not knowing if you’re going to even…be alive the next day, or some deep shit like that. It’s…seriously bro, it’s the best aphrodisiac. Like, it was working for me too, you know? ’Cause I mean, even I didn’t know what would happen, you know? I mean we were there for months man, months, just living like cavemen in these…Cretaceous dinosaur times… and like, hunting these giant raccoon-type things, ’cause they were the only things that kinda looked normal and didn’t freak us out too much to eat. I mean, you don’t know what’s poisonous, right? It’s like a different time and shit, everything is like, on another level. I dunno, Lucy explained it to me. I don’t know that science shit, all I know is it was pretty intense, man. Like, the fucking and the life. I mean, nothing can prepare you for that, you know? No matter how many reps you do you’re just not ready to tackle all those giant turkeys and bats and crows and shit, you know? Like,fuck, man. I mean, you know I’m not the scared type usually, but fuck, man. When you’re there it’s different, you know?

So anyway bro, there we are in this hut-cave thing, making sweet sweet love and shit, you know? And suddenly we hear these creepy-ass tropical bird noises circling around the hut… I mean, that was pretty much in the background all the time there, so you kinda got used to it, but it was really close this time, like right in our ears almost, so we were like, what. The fuck. Dude.

So I just freak the fuck out now and grab my spear and start stabbing like crazy outside the window-holes or whatever, and just screaming like totally freaking the fuck out, and Lucy’s like crying and shit and covering her face and ears; and then these heads come pecking through the fucking window-holes and trying to bite us and shit—for realz man, these things were vicious, like think giant angry crows—and so I just went on this…rampage, like flight or fight shit, and there was nowhere to “flight” to, ’cause we were stuck in this cave or whatever, this fucking…hole in the ground. So I just burst out of the hut like a fucking bat out of hell, and just start screaming and killing, like Rambo or some shit haha I dunno. And they start trying to fly up and attack me, but they can’t really fly man, they were just flapping around like chickens or whatever, you know, like, they could get off the ground a bit but they weren’t flying, you know? It wasn’t like The Birds or nothing like that, it was more like…being attacked by a pack of wolves, but they were cawing and flapping their wings and trying to slice me with their toe knife things.

And I’m just like, no. Hell no. Just stabbing them in the neck and shit, and in the rib cage, and just blood flying everywhere and all over me and getting in my eyes. But the spear was getting stuck in their rib cages, right? So I had to pull it out with my foot after, but really fast-like so I could stab the next guy before he bit me or sliced me open. At the same time though I’m doing like some crazy Kung Fu shit and twirling my spear around to knock out the guys behind me, you know? ’Cause seriously, there was a lot of them, bro, you have no idea.

And then… Bro, bro, bro. Listen. Just when I thought I couldn’t go more bat-shit crazy, this one motherfucker manages to like…half-fly, half- climb…up on to my back, and slices me right where I have this scar here. And I just freaked. the. fuck. OUT.

They messed with the wrong motherfucker that night, let me tell you, ’cause I just lost it. No, seriously bro, I just dropped my spear, and grabbedthe guy by his fucking duck-neck, and just fucking bit his neck off. With my teeth. Like, some next- level Ozzy shit.

Like the Cretaceous fucking Ozzy Osbourne.

And I start doing it to the others too, like, just grabbing them and biting them and ripping parts out of them that I didn’t even know they had, and just crushing them with my feet too and punching them hard and just bashing their little fucking brains in.

Bro. Bro. It was fucking epic. Like, they should seriously make a movie about me right now.

So finally they’re all dead, right? I mean, by the end some of them got scared and tried to run away, but I was having none of that shit. Fucking chased every one of them down, and this one guy that got too far for me to grab it, I just hurled my spear at him, and got it, right in the side of its ass, so the tip was sticking out its lung or something. Like, it didn’t look very healthy after, that’s all I’m saying.

At this point I’m just screaming like a fucking caveman, like Tarzan or some shit, like beating my chest and everything. Fucking lord of the jungle, man. The fucking king. So I turn around to my girl, right? Like, expecting her to be all excited by it, or at least have some fucking gratitude forsaving her ass, you know? But she’s still all crying and shit… So you know, I calm down a little, and go to give her a hug, tell her it’s alright.

But no. She says, “Get away from me,” like she was scared of me. I’m like, excuse me, I just saved our ass, how about some fucking gratitude, you ungrateful bitch? You wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for me.

And then she just unleashes hell, like, she goes on her own rampage, you know? But with words.

She starts giving me this sass, man, like “Ummm, did you miss the part where I made the fucking spear you used to kill those things? Did I ever get any gratitude for that? Or how about the home I built us, a loving home despite the fact that we’re literally living in the fiery depths of hell over here? Where were you when I was making this place, huh? Just dicking around and climbing trees, and burning all the different plants you could find just trying to find the ones that can get you high!”

And then she goes on about how it was my fault we were here—like, how the fuck should I know the hobo-shaman-drug dealer could actually send us back in time? I was just trying to do her a favor and get her to loosen the fuck up for once in her life—and how she…sets all the traps to catch the raccoon-type things, and she cooks them and she cleans our cloths and made us a bunch of new ones and she goes to the river every day and fetches the water and fucking boils it for us so we don’t die—like being all dramatic and shit about everything, you know? Then she keeps going on about how, back in the present, I’ve been “emotionally unavailable” ever since I flunked out of college, and how I’m always getting drunk with the guys and not trying to get a better job and do something with my life and how I’m a slob and I never clean up after myself and how I always hit on her sister and it makes her uncomfortable— which is totally not true, by the way, she’s definitelyinto it—and how blah, blah, blah…

Typical bitches, eh? Everything always has to be about them all the time. She thinks just ’cause I don’t cry and shit like she does that everything’s always cool with me. Well fuck man, I was pretty fucking scared of that place too, let me tell ya. Like holy fuck, bro, am I glad that’s over.

She thinks that ’cause I don’t cry and complain and shit like her that everything’s always my fucking fault, that she’s always the victim. I mean, if I were the sensitive type like she says she wants me to be, she wouldn’t even be with me, you know? Like that guy Tobias! He’s been in love with her for years, and he’s a pretty good-looking guy, no? He’s all smart and shit too, and they’ve known each other since before…even before I even knew her. But he’s always so calm and sensitive and shit, and everyone just talks over him all the time, so he doesn’t get laid much.

Not Tommy. Tobias, man. Tobias doesn’t get laid much. Are you even listening?

She listens to that guy Jacques though, no matter who else is talking. Probably ’cause he’s all foreign and shit. I don’t know how the dude is so smart, and so fucking confident too. Not like Tobias. I think it’s different in Europe, you know? You can be a nerd and confident, too. It’s like… they’re all hipsters over there or something, but with more expensive clothes.

I dunno. She says they’re “just friends,” that she likes to talk to him ’cause supposedly he listens or whatever. Well…fuck man, I’m just friends with Lindsey, but you don’t see me inviting her over to our place for tea every other day, you don’t see me just…ignoring Lucy every time I talk to Lindsey. Of course, I can’t talk to her about it… I mean, I’ve tried. But then she tells me to calm the fuck down, that I’m being “macho” or whatever. So I get a little angry when we talk about it, so what? Like, would she prefer it if I cried about it? Honestly bro, like do you think I should just…cry? Or would she think I’m a pussy? I’ve never seen Jacques cry, that’s for sure. Never even seen him get upset about anything, just smiling his cocky fucking Euro-trash smile all the time.

But oh, I’m the bad guy, ’cause I wanted to get high when the fucking dinosaurs were about to eat us and I couldn’t deal. ’Cause she made the fucking hole-in-the-ground house and I did nothing. ’Cause she invented and built the fucking time machine that brought us back. Well la di fucking da bro, I could have made that fucking time machine too if I’d studied science and shit like her, and I tell you what: it wouldn’t have taken me eighteen fucking months neither.

You know, I read an article the other day— ’cause you know, been trying to read papers and stuff so I can keep up with that Euro-fuck piece of shit Jacques—and it said the loneliest people in the world are the really educated women and the really uneducated men. Well, Lucy is pretty fucking educated. She doesn’t seem too fucking lonely to me. I dunno man, it’s just… I’m starting to feel all…alienated or, whatever. You know?

I mean, I didn’t expect this for my life neither, you know? Like, remember high school, man? We were the fucking kings of that joint, remember? Like, everything seemed so easy. I thought that would have turned into something by now, you know? I mean, we were promised so much more,man… What ever happened to “get rich or die trying,” bro? Like Fitty Cent and Entourage and all that shit, promising us the thug life if we’re just pimp enough to reach out and grab it? Like, first year college, bro, remember? That was the bomb, bro. Fuckin’…frat parties here, keggers there, getting laid all the friggin’ time and not knowing where the fuck we even were when we woke up… Remember that shit? We were winning, dawg. Then what the fuck happened?

It’s like everything’s backwards now. People who stayed in studying all day are off getting jobs and buying fancy-ass condos downtown, and guys like us got fuck-all. Where’s my pool house? Where’s my friggin’ Lambo? That’s what we were promised, no? That’s what all the songs and TV shows were about. Who knew that’s not how it was? No one told us shit… I mean, the teachers did, but who the fuck are they? Just…sad-ass, wrinkled old squares on their third divorce… Who would want to be like that? I just feel so lied to, you know? Like everything I did was for nothing. The only good thing I ever accomplished was getting with Lucy, and that might be going too now.

Lucy, man… All those times I let her down, all those times I went out with the guys instead of staying in and watching her fuckin’ chick flick shit—they’re not even that bad, you know? Nothing a beer or two can’t get you through. Could have just stayed home and drank there. So what if they called me a fag? So what if they said I was pussy-whipped? It’s just words, yo.

I dunno… You think it’s over, man, or do I still got a chance? Be honest with me, bro. You think I can fix this, or am I totally fucked?

…Bro? Dude, bro!

Whatever. Just…forget it, man. You’re not even listening.

No matter how many times I drained one of my father’s bottles, it never seemed to be enough.I tossed the empty bottle between my hands; it was my fifth one that night, my twentieth this week. Sighing, I dropped the bottle to the floor and kicked it under my bed to join the others. The bottle…

Joanna Johnson did not think that she was special in any way whatsoever. She knew that she was a fairly good athlete in high school, and that she had an excellent memory for birthdays. However, she never felt that sense of knowing that others seemed to—that belief that they were destined for some greater purpose. The…

It’s just past two in the morning when Sarah switches off her alarm, buttons up her dressing gown, and sits down to write to Amber’s husband. She accepts that this is not exactly a normal thing to do—less normal, say, than eating white bread, than wearing M&S knickers and standing in bus queues and tracking the…

It’s July 4th, and She’s announced they’re going to the aquarium again. She never asks anymore, just announces.“Sophie loves the sharks,” She says, and, turning to him, adds, “I read on the website the Great White is male.”He surveys her blonde hair and the cleft in her chin. Twenty years, He thinks. He used to joke that…

I still dream about the hole in the lake. I hover over it, suspended by the thinnest of threads, waiting to fall. There are monsters and currents flowing under the earth.

Do you remember the hike, Jake? The first time with just the three of us, you and me and Catherine? I think that was when we finally realized what we were doing. That moment when she came out of the water laughing, dripping, shivering for a towel. Everything in that moment was so symmetrical. The towel between us, Catherine in front of us, all equidistant.

Do you remember when she first appeared? You were nineteen and I was trailing two years behind. I bought cigarettes off you at five dollars a piece. I watched over your shoulder as the modem squealed and pictures of breasts materialized from the pixels. It was 1994, it was northwestern Washington, and the sun had turned Catherine’s skin to caramel.

“Who’s going first?” Mike said, and a nervous tremor ran through the group. “Kyle?”

I stared at the water below. A few kids inched to the cliff edge and looked over, then backed away, shaking their heads. We gave each other playful shoves and called each other pussies. Then Catherine, Mike’s shy little sister, just walked over and jumped off. Tucked herself into a slender blade, pierced the water and disappeared into the green depths. Her head popped up and she blinked water out of her eyes, grinning and gasping.

“Whooo!” she said.

Of course you were the next to go. You yelled some sort of battle cry, Geronimo or Banzai. You closed your eyes and you leaped.

They cheered for you. “Whooo!” and “Yeah!” and “Go Jake!”

You landed just a few feet from her. Could have broken her neck, but I was the only one who thought about things like that. When you surfaced, your faces were nearly touching; she screamed and splashed you and you chased her back to shore.

When the sun started to fail we headed back to the cars, tired and happy, damp and gritty with sand and pine needles between our toes. We piled into the back of Mike’s Jeep with Catherine squeezed between us. I remember the feeling of her arm against my naked ribs. The way it stuck there, warm and salty, peeling gently away when she shifted.

When we got home I asked you about her. Portentous questions like, “What’s the story with Mike’s sister?” You answered them with a blankness I found odd but not worrisome. You were my older brother. You were a different species.

Washington wasn’t prepared for that summer. A dry, brutal heat that shocked our rain-drenched bodies and emptied the Home Depot of its air conditioners. Skagit Valley Community College became a third-world country, men without shirts slumping against trees or pacing the square, fights breaking out over nothing. I sat at my desk in a puddle of sweat and thought about Catherine, letting the algebra equations in front of me blur into clouds of gnats. I spotted her sometimes on campus, her mouse-brown hair bouncing in a loose ponytail. She was young, but a different kind of young. Sweet sixteen and already out of high school, well on her way to an Associate’s degree through the Running Start program; I was older than her by the calendar only. High school dragged along behind me, clinging to my ankles like a half-dead animal.

You already had your degree, Jake; you had a job and a car and I envied your freedom. Wished I could advance time through sheer determination, somehow catch up to you and pass you. Those strange days when youth was a curse.

Slowly, subtly, we pulled Catherine into our circle. In the unbearable summer heat, regular trips to Whistle Lake were a necessity. The truth was I hated the cliffs, the blinding terror of looking over that edge, shutting down every natural instinct and jumping off. I know you felt the same, but we faked it and became the initiators, the ones who made the phone calls—five, sometimes seven days a week. Our friends’ greetings began to sound weary. The groups began to shrink. Eventually it was just you and me, Mike and Catherine, and then Mike got a job and it was just us.

I remember the first time we picked her up without Mike. Pulling up at her house in your Civic, me in the back seat like a taxi passenger because you said it’d be chivalrous. The cautious smile on her face as she climbed into the front.

“Hi, guys,” she said.

We said “Hi” at the same time, and I couldn’t tell if she heard me or if my voice blended into yours. I stared at the back of her head above the headrest, at the little blue clips holding her hair where she wanted it. We sat in the shade while she swam alone. We smoked Camels and munched Keebler pizza chips, watching the rippling shape of her legs kicking underwater. You pulled a beer out of your backpack and twisted off the cap.

“You have beer?” I said, amazed.

You grinned and handed me one. We sat in the dirt drinking the thin lager, watching Catherine climb up the cliff yet again. She seemed to genuinely love jumping. Even when there was no one watching, no one to think she was cool.

“Hide it when she comes back,” you said, and took a drink.

“Why?”

“She doesn’t like being around people drinking.” I looked at you. “How do you know?”

“She told me the other day when I was at Mike’s.”

“Oh.”

“I guess her dad drinks a lot.”

“Oh.”

Catherine flew down and slipped gracefully into the water. She emerged onto the sand, pulling her hair back, adjusting her bright blue bikini top, her tan stomach glistening.

“God, it’s cold!” she laughed, rubbing her arms, and we both jumped up. Grabbed for the towel between us like it was piñata candy. Our eyes locked, I hesitated—so briefly—and you got the towel. You handed it to her, and she wrapped it around her shoulders. She looked at you and said, “Thanks, Jake.”

It was evening when we dropped her off. She waved and we waved back. We were quiet on the way home.

“Catherine’s cool,” you said after several miles. You said it like an offhand observation, an inconsequential thought, but that was our language and we knew the meaning.

“Yeah,” I said, watching the yellow lines dart under the car. “I think she’s pretty cool too.”

Your head twitched like you were going to look at me, but you didn’t. We drove home.

When I found the hole in the lake, it felt familiar to me. As if I’d been there many times and had somehow forgotten. Glimpses lost in the wrenching and twisting of waking up, buried in the nauseous haze of old fever dreams. I thought of the morning we found out Mom had cheated on Dad when we were little kids. I thought of the night Dad shoved you into the fridge and all the magnets fell off, how your face hardened so much it scared me. Memories floated up from the hole like dead bodies loosed from their weights. The hole offered them to me, a grotesque hello.

I started to see more of Catherine at school and felt a tightening in my gut. At home you and I talked less. Undertones and overtones appeared in our voices. She called out to me from across the tiny campus and I waved. She ran up and hugged me hard. I saw my handprints on her back when she walked away, bleach-white on her blue Hypercolor shirt, and I wished the cool air wouldn’t erase them so quickly. Later she appeared in a new class and sat next to me. She kept smiling at me like my presence made her happy. I didn’t know what to feel.

When you got home from work you would ask me if I saw her in school and I’d say yes. Then you’d tell me you saw her at Mike’s last night and talked to her about going to the lake again. I’d tell you we walked over to the gas station and got lunch, sat under a tree drinking Clearly Canadian and talking about new bands we’d discovered. You’d nod and tell me you went on a walk with her outside her house. Talked about her dad. I nodded, but I wanted to scream at you that it wasn’t fair, that you were too old for her, that you had promised you’d never chase the same girl as me, that we were brothers and you’d sworn never to fight me this way. You saw it all in my face but it was too late now. We didn’t have control.

It was on our twelfth trip to the lake that I found the hole. We kept going back, taking our fight to the same arena over and over in hopes that something conclusive would happen so we could finally stop. You were ahead of me that day. You threw a twig into her hair and she smiled. You chased her on your bike and I chased her too, but you had a ten-speed and I had an eight. You caught up to her and pedaled beside her, grinning, and the baked earth coughed up clouds of dust that stung my eyes.

There in the forest, by the lake and the cliffs, you were sitting on a log asking if she wanted to see a movie that weekend. I thought I saw her touch your arm.

“Kyle?” she said as I walked off into the trees. “Where are you going?”

“Just looking around.”

She frowned. Her attention was all on me now. I walked away.

I hiked up the mountain for a while, then I went off the trail. Wandered through the trees, everything brown and parched in the scorching heat. Brittle underbrush scratched at my legs, leaving white lines in my tanned skin, sometimes biting deeper, drawing little sips of blood.

I walked out onto a high ledge and there it was. At the bottom of a deep mountain basin of dark evergreens and dusty rocks. A lake. Not Whistle Lake, not the cool green sea that welcomed our sweaty bodies on so many lazy afternoons. A different kind of lake. And then I saw the hole.

I hope you never forget our talk. That moment when I stopped you in the doorway and said, “Hey. I want to say something.” Mom and Dad weren’t home. We were alone in the house, tensed at the top of the basement staircase. Sure we were all just kids. Nineteen, seventeen, sixteen. But look what happened. The moment had weight we never imagined.

“Hey,” I said from the trees behind you, and you both startled. “Come look at this.”

I took you back to the ledge and we stared down at the new lake. It was almost round, a huge, deep bowl in the mountainside like a crater or a caldera. The water was transparent all the way to the bottom, but clouded with a rusty orange haze that blurred the edges of things inside. I imagined it smelling foul, squirming with mosquito larvae.

“Do you see the hole at the bottom?” I said. Catherine nodded. You just stared blankly, like you were daydreaming.

“What is it?” Catherine asked, and no one answered. It was hard to make it out through the deep murk. A ring of ancient concrete wide enough to swallow a house, rusted rebar sprouting all around the rim. And inside it, just blackness. Fathomless depths. A drainhole in the world.

Some of my associations don’t make sense to me anymore. Why one thing should remind me of another, with nothing to link them. The first time you called me from jail, still slurring your words a little, I thought of the hole. And when my wife got sick and the doctor put his hand on my shoulder, I thought of the hole. Just lying there under all that red-orange water, empty and silent and still. Patient.

The three of us stared down at the lake. I looked at you and you looked back, and I sensed that you were feeling the same thing I was. Churning nausea. Nameless dread. Smell of wrinkled skin, bony limbs sprawled in alleyways, red bricks and barbed wire, dark skies over a forgotten world. A feeling that we had slipped off a path and were tumbling, falling.

You swallowed and fidgeted. Your face was pale. Catherine looked at me with some kind of expectation.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I didn’t realize none of us had been breathing until we got back to the trail and I heard three slow gasps. It was minutes before anyone spoke.

“For a billion dollars,” you said quietly as we walked, staring straight ahead, “would you swim in that lake?”

“No,” I said from somewhere deep in my chest. The images began to form at that moment, seeds for future dreams.

“Who do you think built that hole?” you asked.

“Who knows?”

A long pause. When you spoke, still not looking at anyone, there was a small quiver in your voice. “What do you think’s down there?”

“Shut up.”

There was no reason for that response. No rational cause to spit your question out of my head and scrub my imagination. But you nodded.

Catherine looked from me to you. We were quiet all the way to the bikes.

That was the night I told you to take her. Said I didn’t want to do this anymore, that you knew her first and she was your friend’s sister, so if you wanted to make a move, I would step aside and let you. I don’t know why I did it. It wasn’t something I’d been considering before that night; it just came to me all at once in the car after we dropped her off, while the evening air cooled the sweat on my forehead. I remember thinking about those mosquito larvae while I talked to you. No wings or limbs. Just helpless bodies writhing, flailing, silently screaming.

The weight of our deal faded with time. You started dating Catherine and I met other girls and laughed at myself, looking back on a teenage love as light as balloons. But then, of course, you kept dating her, months became years, and you married her. Standing at the altar waiting for her to come down the aisle, you glanced my way and the rightness of it seemed overwhelming. You smiled at me because at that moment it felt like inarguable destiny. Everything turning out for the best.

Later that year you started to drink more. Catherine begged you to stop but you couldn’t. During another scorching summer you got her pregnant. At family barbecues the women crowded around her to share stories and touch her swollen belly while her freckled cheeks radiated joy. The baby was born the next spring and died in its crib for no reason.

I got married, too. It seemed to just happen by itself, like an event in a dream, and the sound of my voice repeating the vows was muffled and foreign. I finished my degree and got a demanding job and rarely ever saw her.

There was a thickness to the air that never seemed to go away. Even in winter, my skin felt gritty, and I sweated in my heavy coats. On the few occasions you and I saw each other, at family reunions, birthdays and funerals, we never talked about the old days or any of our old friends. We didn’t even talk about the weather, which seemed hotter and drier every summer. Everything in our memories seemed to be growing thorns.

And there was something wrong with you and Catherine. The doctor said you shouldn’t try to have any more children, but you did anyway, your genes mixed with hers and curdled, and you made a deformed girl, forever helpless, unable to walk or speak or eat on her own. You drank feverishly then. You began to boil over and hit Catherine, and one night you cracked her jaw and went to prison. You came back years later, broken, everything lost.

I had to remember it then. That conversation on the basement stairs when we were just kids. That tiny little pivot point, a trifling choice that might have changed everything.

The night my wife died I went back to Whistle Lake, drunk and raging and terrified. In the starless dark I hiked the old trail to where we used to sit and smoke Camels, throwing soda cans into the water and
watching them sink. I wandered through the trees all night looking for the rusty lake with the hole in the
bottom, but I never found it. I never found it, Jake. Even when the sun came up and I was sober and got my bearings and searched again, I never found it.

I find it in dreams now. Sometimes I’m flying over it, safe but wary. Other times I’m in the water. The water is sickly warm and I’m swimming, and then I look down and see it gaping around me. Right below me, those infinite shadowy depths, and I feel a current begin to swirl up, an undertow to pull me in, swallow me down. And a deep sound. A rumble chuckling up from that dark, bottomless throat.

Two More Days Till the AngelsThere is an ocean, and a shore, and a man with a cat.The lighthouse looms strangely on the tallest part of the bluffs, the only thing man-made for long miles, crafting that beam to keep (most) ships away. It is an easy thing to think of and a hard thing…