A/N: This is a different story for me. The layout was a little experimental, and if things don't make sense, let me know. It's strange -- I've been writing a lot of anecdotal/vignette-y stuff recently. I hope I set up the right mood. I was kind of going for a Truman Capote/ To Kill a Mockingbird vibe. I could have ended it several ways. Talk to me about the end. Title is iffy. Inspired by the song Lake Ponchatrain, by Ludo.
--
It had been two weeks since he had drowned in the lake.
The houses of the town seemed to file by the lake like attendants of a wake. Solemn and gray. Unpainted, or painted with a thin shawl of paint which peeled and chafed. I sat in the yellow meadow offshore of the lake and I watched the water as insects broadcasted their strange, tongueless language. The lake sprawled there, green and magnetic. The whole town was silent beside it, like children to be seen, but not heard. I chewed on some grass and spat occasionally. Something about it. It held the slack air. It held the voices of the townspeople. It squatted there, with the soul of my brother sunken and twined somewhere in its brackish slump. I stared at it. The lake cooled evenly. It swelled and deflated, like the lungs of an orator.
The crickets were mean and scolding that afternoon.
*
Perhaps the strangest thing about the lake was the lack of animal life around it. No birds, no frogs, fish, no deer, no squirrels, no people. And the plants grew green and stringy around it, with a few wrinklefaced bayou trees leaning in with trappings of skunkmoss from their bows like wares from the arms of a salesman. My brother liked to skip rocks at its bank. He liked to walk around it. After we moved here, he spent every free moment he had down by the lake. I would play alone, or listen to granny tell stories in the evening as the night-moths moved in on the porch, bearing tortured faces of camoflauge printed on their backs.
At night, there were always the moths.
They moved in like coagulating platelets.
They were breathless and delicate. Moonkissed antennae, blank faces folded and mute. Slow traffic of dip and brush. At first, they were a curiosity. They rested on our clothes like pale, sunless lovenotes. They caught the moonlight. They haloed the bald, electric lights. But then they got into the clothes and we found them in the crooks of the ceiling and in the cupboards, exhaling from every surface and they became a nuisance.
We found them all over my brothers bed as he slept the week before he drowned.
*
I stood at the banks of the lake. It tongued and murmured. Still as a scrying glass, dark trees rising from its shallow areas like necromancers. A filthy flotsam clotted the edges of the lake, full of twigs and dead insects and algae and it humped and seethed and spoke. I stood looking at the spot where they'd found my brother. Skin puffed up, lips blue, eyes upturned like teacups. Hands folded in holy invocation. And the lake offering him up to us.
We found him among the cattails and the reeds.
He was buried in the town cemetery in a small grave – rounded, faceless rump of earth with a tombstone disclosing unfulfilled dates of birth and death.
The lake intoned for me. I closed my eyes. There were no more insect sounds. The day was still and hot and stripped. I could smell rot and the scent of my brother's hair and the longfaced cattails stood still and thin as spectators at a hanging.
I walked closer to the lake.
where are you tommy?
tommy?
*
He had not come in for dinner that night.
The moths were out in great numbers.
Mother chopping onions, pale white layers slipping away from each other like orbits. Father back from the mines, face black and creased and cheerful and his hands smelled of coaldust and oil and leather. Granny slept in the easychair.
Godssakes, Milly, call your brother in, will you? He's been hanging around that awful lake since sun-up, said mother.
Aw, leave the poor kid alone, said father. It's good to see he's gotten something out of this place.
That lake gives me the creeps.
It's the old trees and the moss.
Mother swiped the onions off the cuttingboard and onto a skillet.
Maybe, she said.
He'll be in for dinner. Don't worry. You can smell those onions from the other side of town.
Which isn't saying a whole hell of a lot.
Father smiled. When he smiled, the lines in his face cracked his mask of coal like shifting continents. He got up from the couch and went to the bathroom to wash up. I wandered into the kitchen and watched mother. Unchopped onions sat on the counter like fleshless skulls in an ossuary.
Granny snored.
Tommy never came in and we had dinner before we went out looking for him.
*
I stood in the shallows. The water was warm and grabbed delicately at my ankles. The sun drooped over the horizon, used and secondhand. Yellow, paper sky. Clouds red and long, like skinned animals. The first moths were out. Clip, flutter, scale. Ascending like grace notes. Mother warned me. I don't ever want to catch you there. At that godawful lake. She cried when she said this. She was crying a lot. She sat in her room on her bed with the door shut and slept with a snapshot of my brother under her pillow. In the picture, he was a blackandwhite figment. Imprinted like a boneless fossil in shale. Squinty black eyes. His smile a quatermoon.
My mother smothered him with her restless sleep and her pillow.
where are you tommy?
I felt completely at peace. I stood in the reeds where they found his body. Blue lips. The moths filtered around me, fussing at my face and my hair like a mother grooming. I could feel him. Right beside me. Under me. In the lake, in the green face of the lake. A door slammed. Skinny dog bark – lonely, half-described sound, acoustic in the skimmed air.
tommy
i know youre here tommy. you can stop hiding now.
The lake scooped and nursed around me. I took a step further and I got gooseflesh and I closed my eyes and I opened my mouth and the sun cooled below the black horizon. Schools of moths. I could feel them kissing up my arms and at my neck, like some bedded lover. They crawled down my blouse and onto my stomach and they whispered in my ears.
milly.
i knew youd come for me milly
I took another step into the lake and the water came up to my waist. I could feel the slimebacked rocks under my bare feet. The lake foreclosed around me and Tommy in the reeds with his hands in holy invocation and Mother on the porchsteps, calling, calling. Further, until the water reached my neck. Green vowels in my ear. Trees supervised the ceremony like a priesthood.
tommy.
you just wait tommy. you shoulda known you wouldnt get away from me.
you shoulda known.
And Mother was stomping through the marsh meadow and into the lake and wrapping her arms around my waist and screaming, Milly, Milly! what are you doing? oh lord, oh lord! And I tried to pull away back into the water, into my brother, lurching out of her arms as the moths fluttered and tossed around us, like bits and pieces of the broken, fading sunlight.
Among the reeds with blue lips and eyes upturned like teacups.
Mother pulled us onto the bank and held me and I cried with her as she rocked me back and forth.
you shoulda known, you shoulda known.
*
The moths wandered around us.
