Lusus Naturae

The dark lake only buoys its own natatory denizens, it allows some to swim, some to glide, dip or delve, but those sombre waters pull down children seeing them only as the cloud spawn of alien shores. The waters are one unnatural creature, a sucking swirl; a single stomach, that throttles, snags, and crushes, it clogs the mind with the coiling swirls of convulsive ghosts. I am drowning, I fall upwards into a darkness that contains no earth or sky. The lake is a basilisk, it snakes into wide open eyes, darkens the blood of small boys until they choke, strangling on their own fear. Decades later I awake, expelled once more from the churn of its malignant maw, still struggling inside a heartless embrace. That cold lake remains within me to this day It is a liquiform parasite that squirms in my dreams; a submerged memory of my death - in waiting.