Overnight, the lake reveals itself.
We wake to the sudden beating of its body against our properties.
The sudden beating. The sudden beating.
At first, we ignore it. We see it but pretend not to. Like we often do with our neighbors. But then our pets begin to disappear. A labradoodle, a ferret, a hedgehog named Egg Nog. From our cars & homes we skip rumors across this sudden water’s face.
Panic ripples.
We gavel the town council to order. We vote to close debate without debating, then gather our rifles & torches at the shore. We throw fire at the water, misfire, throw fire at the water, misfire. Our fingertips ache from the matches burning down. We try again & again, thousands of us, filling the lake with beach sand, shore sod, train tracks & their gravel, shards of bike paths, the ruins of concessions stands, the heavy stones of wavebreaks. We keep filling, keep dredging. We dump parked cars in the lake. We dump the parking meters. We dump the bags of change collected from the parking meters. We dump our credit cards & cake pans & high cholesterol medication. We dump the parking enforcement jeeps, the leftover parking line paint, the cracked orange cones & sand-filled barrels & the wooden police barricades. We toss in the salt trucks & the garbage trucks & fire trucks & ambulances.
Mike says why not the hospital?.
We vote.
The hospital goes into the lake.
Bethany says why not the trees?
We vote.
Into the lake the trees go, into the lake the cliffs go, into the lake the sun seems to go, but we didn’t throw that in, we didn’t even think about that. We know it’s just an illusion. Like the night washing the daylight from the lake’s face & replacing it with its own shimmering emptiness. Which is really an immeasurable fullness. Kyle has an idea: to keep the night to work, we should install floodlights on shore. We vote for floodlights on shore. The floodlights peel open the iridescent grey skin of the lake, the workers, the neighborhoods. We fill & fill & fill the night lake until our muscles ache out of our sweat-stained shirts. We are running out of things, running, running, things, things, but the lake still calmly digests all that we give it. It opens & swallows, opens & swallows. Never a complaint, & as each thing slips beneath the surface, the lake stills, leaving only our own faces staring up at us from the purest mirror water.
Around midnight, we run out of rubble, so we vote to create new rubble from the small businesses of our town. The coffee shop, the ice cream shop, the fudge shop, the muffler shop, the microbrewery, the micropub, the wine bar. We make rubble of the library, the post office, the VFW post, the gas station, the banquet hall, the council chambers. We vote to throw our warm, well-lit homes into the lake. Our warm, well-lit homes go into the lake. We vote to tear down the massive estates. The massive estates go into the lake. The richest of us send their lawyers. The lawyers go into the lake. Along with all the front-end loaders, bulldozers, skid steers, dump trucks, dumpsters, portajohns, floodlights. Then, the shovels & the guns.
Bill says: I wonder if some of us shouldn’t, you know, throw ourselves in as a sacrifice to the cause of wiping out this foreign scourge, this outsider, this sudden attack on our very way of …
Bill goes quiet.
We did not vote for him to go quiet.
He is listening to something beyond us & then we are listening to something beyond us.
A faint voice glimmers across the water. Washes over us. A wave of bloodbright music. We think: where have we heard that before? The lake has always been here. The lake has always been singing.
We call the vote. It is unanimous.
We vote to throw ourselves in. We all volunteer to be martyrs, so we step into the water. But the water will not take us. We stand on the lake, see our faces on its surface flickering in torchlight, moonlight, & realize we go no deeper than that first sheer veil of water, realize we are exactly what stares back at us. We are the invaders. We have inflicted ourselves upon it. By ourselves, by our fear, by our desperate love for what we believed to be true, whether what we believed to be true is actually true or not. Behind us, the missing pets emerge from the trees.