Something from the water jumps up, beats around the air for a moment.

Its luminous scales catch my attention.

I watch it drop back in with a plop, the water rolling away around it.

Thick sheets of opaque green water cover the thing from view.

I think, 'Waves don’t roll as much as they slither.'

I consider the water washing up to bite my ankles.

Feeding things with luminous scales into my body, to feed on what is inside of me.

Perhaps it’s this thing—bludgeoning apprehension, thoughts of things killing me, transforming inert or lifeless things into sinister things with effacing malice at a moment’s notice—that I could do without.

I consider moving into it, to live in the supple cushion of the creeping water.

Maybe there things move too slow for existential consideration.

I keep waiting to see signs of the thing with luminous scales break the surface of the water again.

To see its face in the terse moment of passing.

I want to look for signs of a furrowed brow, bruised skin around the eyelids.

Lips condensed into thin lines and pulled taut across teeth.

Ruinous impressions tucked behind the irises.

Tongue held like a locked door.

The water stays as still as it can be though, glistening as the sun skips light along the surface.

Throwing it around haphazardly, ambiguous motions hidden underneath.

I keep my eyes fixed on the surface of the water.

[redacted] doesn’t say anything.

I look at her.

She's looking over the railing of the pier, at the water some thirty feet below us.

Her face in profile doesn’t fit the glittering, still water further off.

And the hills beyond, the trees and their thin, lithe contours wearing the faint blossoms of the arriving springtime.

Rising ghostlike above the arched ground underneath, adding hollow illusory dimensions to its height.

“So, what are you going to do?”

I wait a moment like I’d been waiting moments for years.

My hands slung in the pockets of my coat, curling into fists.

I look back over the water.

“You don’t look well.”

“I know,” she says.

Of course she knows.

I look at her.

How could she not know?

I consider this being the last time I’ll be with her, our goodbyes said with degrees of finality neither of us understand.

Maybe I’ll understand it later, despite the permeating sense that I could understand it now.

The wind blows over the pier and pushes hair over my face.

The rest of me stays still.

I look down at the walkway.

My feet point forward in a narrow angle.

I don’t know why we came here, and she’s so quiet today.

I look at her, see how unlike herself she appears now.

Like she were dressed in an oversized sweater, her small body lost in the thick fabrics of grave thought.

Her face looks nothing like it used to.

When we were younger, during memories I have that are now, for some reason, difficult to recall.

“Will you come with me?” she says, finally.

“I don’t want to go alone.”

For a moment I look away.

Back toward the water, the mirage of trees above the hills.

The sun curled like a fist.

The multiform assemblage of clouds.

And, suddenly, it doesn’t sound like her saying it.

It sounds like a girl—just some girl—that I met at the pier today.

As though I should have gone to [redacted]'s house, but I kept walking.

Caught in some reverie.

Intuitively led to the walkway, the railing.

Stopping beside this girl looking out over the water, and she spoke to me.

I look at her, and can't help noticing her slow atrophy again.

Except now, standing in the center of all these wide open vacillating expanses, it seems to have bore deeper.

Past points of notice, to degrade some incorporeal quality.

Some quintessential property.

It’s in the way her faint unsteady appearance has taken over every appearance of hers in my mind.

It’s in the way her hands grip the railing a little too tightly in the gentle breeze.

“We’ll figure it out together.”

And she doesn’t respond to that.

She looks at me.

And she smiles in a small way.

The expression looks wrong on her tired face.

She looks back over the water.

I keep looking at her.

But I can’t say anything.

Finally, she looks at me.

Her face—and mine—are doing things I want to describe, but I can't right now.

And she turns away from the water and starts walking.

To where, I don’t know.

I would like to know.

But, instead, I follow her...