enjoying the forest air

This lake has no bed. It sits at the heart of the woods like a mirror laid flat between the trees, and this man has been staring out across it for hours, not knowing I am watching. His kettle whistles on the campfire. When he shifts upon his log and turns toward the fire I see his face and it's smooth. I think if I could get a closer look I'd find no pores in his skin, no freckles or moles or hair.

Some sense alerts him; he goes stiff for a moment, then relaxes, or appears to relax. The firelight glints in his eyes as he unseats the wailing kettle. His gaze hunts. It lingers on the bushes I'm sitting in and the shadows there. I hold my breath. I wonder if the light is catching my eyes. If it's sliding along the barrel of the rifle in my hands.

The baby-faced man blinks. Looks away. He pours the water into a mug, then plops a tea bag in. Even though he's stopped looking I still feel watched. My heart hammers. It wants to crack open my ribs as he leans down and rummages in his backpack.

Unthinkingly my finger slips in over the trigger. I wanted to be closer. His backpack rattles as he sifts and searches and the sound covers the rustling underbrush as I steady the gun on my arm and aim. I wish I'd brought more ammunition. I wish I'd brought a torch with which to burn this whole glade down. Nobody was supposed to be here. Nobody ever is. My finger tenses.

I'll miss. I'm dead certain. I'm dead: certain.

Out of the corner of my eye, something breaks the surface of that lake. But when I look, there's just a ripple slowly spreading outward. A leaf turns there.

The rattling stops. Firelight winks upon what he drags out, his finger curled about it like mine is around the trigger, and I know my gun will fire an instant before startled muscles depress the trigger, too late to stop it. The world explodes; birds scatter; the bullet ricochets off the mug in his hand, the second one he'd dragged out of his pack.

When the noise has died it leaves a silence deeper than before. The baby-faced man looks straight at me. His mouth slowly opens, the teeth inside too white and packed together in perfect rows, into an O of pantomimed shock.

He begins to rise. His knees creak as those legs unfurl, and keep unfurling, much longer than they seemed or should be possible, and as tears blur my vision I experience a kind of double-sight, him either that man I saw seated who is now standing or this other thing, this unwinding mass like a stretched-out reflection, or both at once somehow.

I blink and the distorted vision clears away with the tears. He is running now, but not towards me. As he leaps into the lake he looks back, and maybe it is my eyes again or the blur of his motion but I can't tell if that is a smile on his face or a grimace of fear.

And just like his body slips beneath those placid waters without leaving an impression, that look, that stretching of his lips, whether promise or panic or both somehow, doesn't crease his face.