The Lake That Ate Me

I Almost drowned, which is to say, I fell upwards into a darkness that contained no earth or sky. Ten years old and a strong swimmer, but that lake only buoyed up its own natatory denizens, it allowed some to swim, some to glide, dip or delve, but it consumes skinny 10-year-old kids; that being the cloud spawn of an alien shore, must be dragged down and chewed, like the pale moons reflection. The muddy waters are one creature, a sucking swirl, a single stomach, it throttles, it snags with cuffing weeds, clogs with the intestines of convulsive ghosts. I am drowning, then they pierce that lusus naturae with a long pole thrust from a skiff; yank me out of its crushing press like bait from a basilisks reeking maw. Years later I still awake from that heaving ‘lac sombre’, an infection of the imagination I’ve been harboring parasitically inside the moil of engulfing dreams. Perhaps incongruously, it takes some time before I will enter rooms with too high a ceiling.