A GARLAND OF MAYFLIES, ETC.

Rebecca says she just doesn't care anymore, and lets him do it, though it doesn't take long or amount to much, just another dribble of filth on a deck already streaked in too many things, and stinking.

Plus the insect corpses strung around everywhere, across the wrapped sail and all along the rigging.

Desiccated and dew-beaded, delicate, lacy, day old, dead—the strange paradox of the carapace, as Kelly calls it; she gives a little speech on the theme, how these creatures had, in that span of hours, hatched and fucked and spread eggs and scattered, lifeless, so much filthy gossamer. Etc.

She used her suntan lotion on me, working some I guess accidentally into my urethra, which burns, and leads me to piss every few minutes, off the busted-up back of the boat, where the motor and the rudder used to be.

Kelly segues into her theory of history, its dialectics. Her nose is bleeding, but she says she doesn't care.

Travis watches me and suggests something, to draw out the poison, or so he says. It sounds okay enough, and then later he asks Rebecca to let him piss on her face, to which she agrees, too, though she complains later that the spray is too warm, that the sun is too hot, that the air is too calm, that the lake is unmoving, that everything is stagnant and smells like old sweat, rotting wood, baked semen, and death.

Kelly laughs at that, but she doesn't move. We all just pretty much stay where we are, out on the deck of the crippled boat, waiting for whatever the next thing will be.

It's hard to stand, anyway, on the shifting surface of things, with the sound of sloshing from the hold, the empty bottles and foam cozies floating in the place where we used to sit, the little built-in benches now covered over in a thin layer of rising water—the benches by the place where there used to be a motor and a rudder and a whole different concept of this weekend trip.

There was nothing particularly sinister about it at first; just a romantic getaway, the four of us old friends drifting into that phase of buying condos and planning either high-maintenance pets or pregnancy, taking Friday off for a four day stint of drinking and drugs, a sort of second adolescence, though once we got out on the water the blubbery heat and boredom sort of wore away our façades. We realized we didn't have stories to tell about the old days, and that made us all sort of shrink back and sulk to ourselves.

But, of course, a storm came, and the smell of it, like singed hair, like a Xerox machine, brought out goose bumps on our skin and made us huddle down in the dark hold, telling the sort of stories we would have never thought to tell. That's how the scraping happened, and the rupture, the floodgates torn open, as Kelly said, literally and figuratively.

Like ghost stories around a campfire. Show and tell. Travis said Rebecca could take his whole fist inside, and the way he said it, his eyes in the flashlight's shaft, implied pretty much everything that was to come, including the interruption, hours later, of the boat getting buckled and torn apart.

And now with the mayflies and most of the drugs gone, not to mention the flares, the compressed air canister from the horn. The lake never seemed so solitary, in our imaginings. Though who would have imagined all this.

Kelly puts on a fleece vest, shivers a little, draws her knees up under her chin. She looks cute again, like she used to, so I tell Travis what I want to see, and he, who has limitless energy in the face of everything, gets to it, and Rebecca comes over to help me watch, though Kelly, less halfway through it, cranes her head a little and vomits over the side.


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