First Kiss

She had always wondered, ever since she first paddled to the middle of the lake towards the end of summer in her third year of vacation here, how many bodies the police have had to pull from this particular lake. The hazy quality of light had always raised in her a certain melancholy, an introspective awareness of not just her own mortality, and it was no different then, set adrift as she was on an ancient, sturdy wooden raft in what was roughly the center of the lake, nothing but that raft and her hands and a battered copy of The Weary Blues and the crust of a peanut-butter and raspberry jam sandwich to keep her company.1

People in this mindset, she had read, often felt a certain compulsion to organize, to make orderly, to straighten, to tidy up. She had always been the sort to make the best of what she had, and so she aligned the crusts with the slants of the topmost layer of wood, laid the book open in perfectly-squared orientation at the center of the raft, which, when she settled again, resembled a floating altar, Arthur's place of meeting with his Lady of the Lake. Her own place of remembrance for those she imagined had died here.2

The copse at the shore over her shoulder stood its silent watch, cloaked in the early morning fog and mist which had settled around the stoic wardens. She knew it must be lonely, guarding this lake for the half-century or more that the trees had grown in their inexorable upward climb. She felt something like that, that she had grown amongst a pack of others growing just the same, but that she was ever apart, that she was as thickly-skinned as the oaks lining the shore. Their roots drank from the soil goblet, constantly draining the ever-replenished vessel. She felt that craving. She was empty, parched. As she cast her gaze back to the raft, she caught sight of Hughes' words, wound tight and brief like a viper ready to strike:3

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.4


And the words sang to her. The water's voice enticed her. And she was parched. And she had never been asked for a kiss before. The romance was brief, as the best of summer are. But she felt safe, wrapped in the warm clear kiss of the lake. The pain too was brief; waves of euphoria supplanted her sense of shock, the initial terror of something so new undermined by the pleasure of belonging, of acceptance. For perhaps the first time she felt truly in good company, proud to share this magic with those who led her here, who captured her imagination, who brought her to such a tender and devoted lover as her lake.5

The lake was dredged for the first time after her brother told the police what he knew of her fascination with the isolated forest shrine.