The First and Final Meeting of Swim Club #112 by Huck Brock

All winter, we nine-to-fived and obeyed lines between boxy buildings, calendar grids, and hour hands, even when the wedge of day narrowed until night waited for us at home. So, when months went by and days got wide and spring sputtered and skipped into summer, we put scratch-off tickets in our shoes and followed clouds to the lake.

On the beach, the air is hazy with the scent of wildfires hundreds of miles across the border in Canada. We want to breathe water.

We remove the day’s clothes, accompanied by whispers of sand and hushed stories of the lake. The lake of broken glass. The lake of fish and turtles with taste for mammal. The lake of brain-eating amoeba. The lake of psychedelic eddies. The lake of ghosts with anxious attachment. The lake of the monsters, ashamed and vengeful.

Stepping to the water, we leave connective belongings like remains of a rapture by gods or by aliens. We leave keys to homes, cars, bike locks. We leave purses and wallets and picture cards with government names. We leave phones and lists of contacts. We leave email. We leave newsfeeds and followers. We leave shoes tucked with tickets to scratch to beckon us back aground with the gray glitter of possibility or certain disappointment.

Bare-topped and butt-cheeked, we slip, splash, wade into the lake until weight leaves our bones, loosens our nerves, unspools our muscles. We swim out until we are between the shores. We’ve lost touch with the bottom. Our imaginations fill in the deeper. The fingers of aquatic plants graze our thighs, caress our legs, and wrap our ankles with whispers of “You could be us.” The plants become hands, the hands become eels, the eels become tongues in the mouth of the lake. The shore becomes the jaw with a jagged tree line of teeth.

We swim, we float, we tread water. The ripples from our bodies cross and merge. The water jostles our inner murk. Our tear ducts open, releasing salt water into fresh. We lose time in the gray, overcast sky. We let our limbs tire. We let our tummies gurgle.

A gentle rain sweeps the smoke into water. Droplets speckle the lake and awaken our faces with kisses. Someone wonders aloud, “What’s the difference between swimming and drowning?”

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HUCK BROCK — Huck is a queer writer living in Minneapolis with his dog, Prairie. He is working on his first novel. This is his first publication. You can find links to his online places at huckbrock.com.

Art by KARISSA HO — Karissa is a writer and painter. Her work has appeared in Red Ogre Review, Humphrey Magazine, Radar Poetry, and JMWW, among others. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she studies English literature and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a very fast walker.