After Nathan Ballingrud

He did not look like a man who would change her life or three men lying in what will someday be the morning before going to work or kissing silence the pristine clarity of purposeful breathing of dogs straining against the hiss of runners the opalescent arc of long imagined reunions with god’s joy leaking for the first time since it had crawled under sarah and shuffled out of the cabin bundled in heavy heat like darkly baking bread the water beating him weird and ululating into flaming eyes he wakes he has already forgotten the ground the heat the sun waits here long enough for water to resolve into something familiar his purpose rote and inelegant.

Adapted from Ballingrud’s “North American Lake Monsters”