Lake Swimming: poetry under prose

I step on to the cold pebbles with my bare feet and walk to the edge of the lake. It is six o'clock in the morning and vapor is escaping the lake creating a mysteries white mist two feet above the water. I prepare to dive in. It's cold, but I know that water in warmer then the air. I breath deep preparing myself to swim across the lake. Two eagles stare down at me from the old gnarled tree above. I move my arms in full circles and dive in. The water is fifty-two degrees, so I start moving fast to warm up. My face and head are chilled. I soon catch my cadence as my hands catch the water. The lake is like a glass, perfectly smooth and cold. I imagine my body breaking the surface tension of the lake and my wake that can be seen from the trail above. Then I think about swimming and everything else disappears like the mysteries mist. I pull my hand out at my hip relaxed and elbow bent. Water drips off my finger tips making small ripples near my head. While my hand is suspend in the air I turn my body and head to take a breath. Just the corner of my mouth escapes the lake. As one eye looks at the mountain tops to catch my bearings to stay on track. Just as quick my head enters the water as my hand  gently glides in front of my body and grips the water like a paddle. I began to pull and my body glides over my hand, as my feet kick to a six beat cadence creating small swirls of water and bubbles behind me. I glance up in the middle of the lake, alone in absolute peace mixed with the challenge of reaching the other side and coming back again. Time escapes and water runs through my fingers and my teeth until I reach the shore. I look up and see the two eagles still watching me.

Number 38 - Keep on swimming, keep on swimming, keep on swimming or never give up on a beta fish

I dragged  into the house after a long day of work to hear my wife screaming my name in terror. I dashed through the door to see what the problem was; I was  ready, fortified with that fight or flight hormone. My wife, visibly in distress, was standing at the kitchen sink with Kadence wide eyed clinging to Becca's jeans, fingernails white. . Besides the look on their faces everything looked in order. I took a quick survey of the room, looking for an intruder or blood. All I saw was a messy kitchen, then I saw it. Out of place, our fish bowl was sitting next to the sink. Usually the fish bowl held a blue beta fish named Dori, but the bowl was empty of fish and water. Becca was trying to speak but the words were getting clogged. I followed her  gestures toward the sink, then toward the bottom of the sink, then toward the garbage disposal. My eyes flasehed from the empty fish bowl to the garbage disposal. Finally, Becca freed her words and murmed in a whispered voice that you might hear at a funeral, "Dori is down there." Once she began talking she could spit out the rest of story. She had been changing the water in the fish bowl, when Dori, perhaps bored of the small fish life inside a glass bowl, leaped from the bowl and into the garbage disposal. Becca had been running  water down the garbage disposal for 30 minutes to keep the fish alive.

Without hesitation I reached into the garbage disposal and grasped Dori loosely. I began to pull my hand out of the sink, however, with my hand in a fist it did not fit through the garbage disposal hole. I had to make a split second decision. I either had to turn the garbage disposal on and end Dori's suffering or squeeze her to death and pull her out to give her a proper funeral, down the toilet. I looked at my wife; I looked at my daughter her eyes wide, squeezing her moms leg, looking at me like I was suppose to be some kind of hero. I squeezed and pulled. My meaty hand still did not fit. I re gripped and squeezed and pulled again. This time I pulled my hand out.

I slowly opened my hand, as Kadence switched from her mother's leg to mine still silent and wide eyed. As I opened my hand the fish didn't so much as slither. I had squeezed Dori to death. I looked down. Kadence's eyes bored into mine, pleading, begging for a good word. I had to try. I brought the fish to my mouth and began CPR. I gave Dori three breaths, right on the gills. The fish was slimy like they are suppose to be, I took this as a good sign. Dori smelled of a bad mixture of dead fish and garbage disposal, but I went on.  Then I gave her fifteen compressions with my pinkie where I thought her heart might be. Nothing happened. I tried again, and again. Nothing. No flinch, no sltiher, no gasping or vomiting. Kadence looked up, as she whispered, about to cry, "991."  I was not ready to give up on Dori, or I was not ready to give up the role as hero.

I held Dori with one hand as I filled her fish bowl with another. In the haste of an ER nurse I slid Dori back into her bowl. Still she did not move. She laid on her side and pengalemed at the top of the water and began to ever so slowly sink like a wet leaf to the bottom. I dashed  in five bounds across the room and put the bowl on its normal resting place, on top of an entertainment center between two speakers. My wife and child looked on in confusion and sorrow, I did not know whether they were more worried about me or the fish. I quickly put in a P.O.D. CD, pushed track three and turned up the volume. Then I stood back and waited. On the third repeat of the singer screaming out the chours,  "alive, I am so glad I am alive," Dori's tail twitched, then a fin wiggled, then a gill fluttered a little and all of a sudden to match the beat of the music, Dori began to swim in circles. She just kept on swimming, kept on swimming, and kept on swimming. I think there is a lesson in this, but I am not sure what.