ICE LAKE SONG
A Flash Fiction Piece for Subscribers
(Previously published on Mother Horror’s Patreon Page)
Two men, striding confidently while shouldering heavy canvas packs and in the prime of their worldly capability, stepped off the snow pack and onto the marble-hard lake. Twilight cloaked the world and the black lake waters which would soon blue themselves like gunmetal steel when the morning came.
“You know, she might be onto something, Bobby,” says one of the men, just a pace ahead of the other.
“We talking about the loan again?” asks Bobby. “Christ, Jack. I gotta hear it from Jen. Now I’m getting it from you.”
Jack sniffed the mucus clear of his nostrils for fear it will frost on his lip. “No,” he said. “Well, I mean I just think it’s worth thinking about. You put everything into the business up to this point. Why wouldn’t you double down? You’ve trimmed the fat in the shop. Work’s picking up a little bit.”
Bobby sighs more than he speaks. “Fuck me with this. We’re supposed to be fishing.”
“I know, just hear me though. You put the cars down as collateral. Get a little loan, keep it floating. I mean, not to beat a dead horse, but it’s like you said, right? Savannah Oil is hauling in crawler rigs in a couple of weeks. We’ve got the trucks. Shit fire, Harvey Martin just shut down off Highway 20. You get those Savannah jobs and we’re talking about work for more than a year. Potentially millions. I don’t wanna miss out on that. Neither do you.”
“The cars aren’t enough,” Bobby says. Though he does not have a diploma, Bobby has mastered the calculus of failure, knows the terminus of loss when he sees it. “The house and the cars, maybe.”
Twenty steps from the back-and-forth of the friends traveling over the snow-salted ice, there stands on the lake a single room shack of weathered pine, its frowning edifice populated by three lonely features: a steel, smokeless chimney pipe, a padlocked door, a dark window.
With a deft, gloved hand, Jack unlocks the fishing shack door and immediately moves to the diesel heater which he examines through the steam streamers of his breath. He primes it, waits, then brings it to life.
Bobby closes the door on the outside world though he cannot shut out the thoughts of the shop and the bills and the risk and disappointment he carries within himself as he sets down his bag, careful not to take the slender reed of one of the fishing poles in the eye. That’s just what he needed, a medical emergency in the middle of nowhere two miles from his pick-up, half-blind and wholly broke.
“There’s plenty of time to talk about it, my man,” says Jack in that sweet tone that is just another deferment of time until he will bring it up again.
The heater warms the cabin. Jack runs the ice auger. The men rig their poles, dreaming of a fat pike by noon, a favorite meal among these friends. Jack and Bobby sit opposite each other, dropping their lines one at a time until their lures sink and sink, visible until the depths steals the glimmer of their counterfeit shapes and the shine of their sterling hooks. A silver flask is passed back and forth. Sighs are exchanged.
Jack’s patience is a stick of TNT Bobby can see running the length of its stubby fuse. “Have you asked the bank how much you’d be approved for?”
“It’s not your fucking company, Jack.”
The fire in Jack stirs, clenching his fists. “It’s my fucking career, Bob.”
The oilfield has given Bobby many worldly gifts: salesmanship, hard work, strong hands. But for all its changing effect, it has never given him the gift of violence. Jack has a short fuse, has beaten men near half-to-death. Bobby is what the men of his industry refer to as: a talker. This is why he makes the calls and writes the emails and seals the deals.
“It is your career,” Bobby replies, tone soft and understanding. “And I know I am disappointing you. I don’t want to do that. You’re my best friend.” Bobby says these things, he does not believe them. He is afraid of Jack’s temper igniting in a single room ice fishing shack in the middle of nowhere.
Jack’s demeanor slackens, red face going white. “I hear you,” the man says.
Bobby leans back, surprised. “You do?”
“Ohhh,” coos Jack, nothing like himself. “Ohhh.” His eyes glass over, wet. His mouth slopes to a plaintiff shape, a shape which can make only a supplicant sound.
“The fuck…the fuck are you doin’, man?”
“Listen,” says Jack, little more than a breath. “Listen.” Even softer the second time.
The silence. The silence.
Then, a sound. A sound that chews into Bobby’s ears. A reverberation dimpling the waters where the fishing lines are laid, coming from the blue-black void cut into the whiteness of the ice. Notes spill out of the abyss light and golden. And it comes and goes, his last opportunity to escape, to run out of that shack where he might for many years return to his failing marriage and business and every survivable complaint. It ticks by without Bobby ever noticing.
Slender, groping fingers the color of frost lay over the open ring. A form follows, effortless in ascension. The hair, white as hoarfrost and dripping, crowns a wide, lineless brow. Her eyes are black, lidless, pin-pricked at the center. Bobby’s vision vaguely recognizes that the woman is naked and his primate brain urges him to look, to see…but all he can do is hear. The woman’s voice, the song she sings touches the center of him, like fingertips brushing the pillar of his soul, ensuring its total collapse. She then descends into the depths, all while singing.
The two men listen, then, stride confidently, while in the prime of their worldly capability, and step off the ice and sink into the black abyss. Following without complaint. Happy to drown.