credit: Sarah Ahmad
Mirror Lake
Christian Rose
Winter 2010
Winter 2010
After last night’s party the quiet at Stacey’s cottage felt amplified, like the quiet after the screaming impact of a car crash.
Chris crawled out from beneath the picnic table where he’d slept and squinted into the mid-day sun. He hated the sun. It was the sun that chased everyone else away from this place, the sun that always ended nights he wished would go on forever.
The driveway was empty now. Last night it was jammed, the whole crew back together before going their separate ways back to college. College had ended prematurely for Chris. There was nowhere for him to go now except the disappointed faces back at his parents’ house in Binghamton.
He collected himself and sat at the picnic table, his gaze falling curiously on the cottage. Daylight had changed the place. At night it felt like a mansion. Now it looked small and humble, almost destitute here among the other cottages. The ground had settled strangely beneath it, tearing a crack in one wall large enough to piss through.
Chris didn’t like seeing the cottage in the daylight. This version of reality didn’t coincide with his nighttime memories. Unfortunately, this time he didn’t even have any memories. He’d been so anxious last night that he drank a bottle of Boca Chica rum on the ride out in Mike’s Jeep. He was already lost in a blackout by the time he arrived.
A single question rose in his mind now, slowly, like a bubble from the bottom of the lake. What did I do? Chris could almost hear the question’s hallow pop in the void of his erased memory. He felt the familiar shame and paranoia flood through him as his mind raced blindly for an answer.
It was common for memories to stay lost for hours, even days. Once he’d witnessed a stabbing at a bar in downtown Binghamton and hadn’t remembered watching the rhythmic eruptions of blood hit the ceiling until he saw a headline in the newspaper two days later.
Why hadn’t Mike just dragged him out from under the picnic table and thrown him in the Jeep? Chris was stranded here now. Binghamton was 20 miles away, the phone in the cottage already disconnected for the off-season, his own cell phone and wallet locked in Mike’s glove compartment as a safe-guard against his own tendency to lose everything when drunk.
Chris’s elbows leaned on the rickety picnic table. The birds sang and the waves lapped at the shore. Lawnmowers buzzed in the distance and kids frolicked in the water off nearby docks. The sounds were unfamiliar, almost alien. Chris was used to night sounds here, shouting, laughing, the thumping stereo and crackle of a big fire. The company of his old high school friends, mixed with the alcohol, was almost womb-like in its safety and simplicity. And now, as he sat alone at the rickety picnic table, the feeling was anything but womb-like. He looked at the crack running down the side of the cottage and thought of it as the slit in the womb he’d been aborted from.
Chris staggered up from the table and made his way across the yard to the back steps, hoping to stumble across some remnant from the night before that might trigger a memory.
Inside the cottage he made his way through the wreckage of empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. Apparently Stacey hadn’t been too worried about straightening up. Maybe she was coming back tonight? Had that been the plan? Chris felt a sudden rush of excitement and hope at the thought of this. It had happened before. Stacey would drive back to Binghamton to lifeguard during the day and be back here before sundown with a car full of coworkers.
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