I assigned this to my Gotham class recently. From The Art of Fiction, a great book in spite of Gardner’s ugly and bogus disdain for the genre ghetto.
Describe a lake from the point of view of a man who has just committed a murder. Do not mention the murder or death.
My take on the assignment:
The gaunt man sat on a flat rock and looked down at the lake. It was almost perfectly circular. Tall pines surrounded it like sentinels, except for the short arc of cliff where he sat. The sun had been up for several hours and the rock was warm. The gaunt man rested his hand on the hard surface, palm down, and imagined the heat entering his body through his hand, filling him and overflowing, spilling like blood, warm like blood, spilling out of his eyes, his mouth, his nose.
The sky was deep blue, without a single cloud, the lake beneath the reflection of cloud and sky a deeper blue, as if it held not only the mirrored infiinity above but a shadow world as well. The gaunt man had been coming to this lake for years and recalled something of its origin. A dam had been built several miles up into the hills and this lake was the result. There had been a few houses, a store, a gas station — not really a town, barely a wide spot in the road nestled in a nearly circular depression a half-mile in diameter. He imagined the irregular lake bottom, slick mossy rocks and the pulpy rotted husks of trees. The broken precision of a road, asphalt buckled and cracked. And there in the cool, green dark– the hulking shape of a house.
He closed his eyes and imagined himself there on lake bottom, feet floating a few inches above the driveway gravel, bobbing with the current. The house loomed before him; a pair of empty, broken windows stared in mute reproach.
He turned his face up to the sun and the image dissolved. The sun was purple and bright through his closed eyelids. He wanted to open his eyes, to re-enter the world. The warmth of the sun felt good on his face and he hated the good feeling. He dragged his hand along the surface of the rock until it snagged on a sharp spur and he pushed harder and dragged his hand again until the spur opened the ball of his palm and blood began to flow.
Hi, Dan, at your recommendation I got this book. I remember doing this exercise too but I like your version much better! Especially when he cuts himself…I was expecting that! ;O)
And up from the murky depths rise corralled swollen bubbles- having suffocated the stubborn collision of oxygen and water. They burst at the surface, a final sigh of air released back into the atmosphere clogged with lonely souls moaning in synchrony with the wind through creaky tree branches.
The gritty shore sand is mortar packed in around jagged rocks. Rocks reminiscent of porous fish vertebrae, except tainted black as if they had been roasted in coals, are ribbed with clenched nerves in pursuit of high tide. The tide provides perfect conditions for surprising, miraculous water bugs, whose fragile limbs buoy its body on the surface.
With the tide comes a collection of lost things. Dropped in the water and slowly forgotten as their weight and the pressure of the gasping lake wriggle them into darkness where their absence is unnoticed, replaced by the next fleeting thought, a reminder of internal turmoil.
Today, the lake is punished; left in company of thrashing winds, a lone swan, and clouds darker than the cavity between its lungs. Lungs which contain the air to fuel the flames in the underbelly of the lake, concealing its bowels. The flames which control the waves, the flames that when just a lick out of control can flip a boat of fishermen, stripping them from their wasted breaths and lulling them towards the bottom.
I walk up to dip my hands in the shallows of the lake. I dig them deep into the sand, letting its rough pebbles exfoliate the webbing between my fingers. I press them deeper, focusing my energy out through my palms and into layers of sleepy sand grains which have gone undisturbed for years. The unzipping of my calloused skin is silenced by the water as a barb of brown glass burrows into the threads of my muscles. I awaken the lake as my blood departs from my body in clouds I will never be able to recollect, that drift out to stain the wings of the swan. And as I walk away I hear the greedy stomach of the lake beg for more.
I wrote this last week for a high school english class. I found it interesting that our endings are the same.