“Whose boat is this?” he asks her. “I don’t know,” she says, “but let’s take it out onto the water for a bit. No-one will notice. And maybe we’ll see something cool. People say the lake is supernatural. There’ve been stories.”
“Give me a break,” he says. Then he says, “what stories?”
“Well, you know this is an artificial lake, right? They flooded a town to build it. There’s a legend that the people of the town never left and continue to live out their lives under water, completely oblivious.”
“Did they grow gills?” he asks.
She shrugs. “The legend doesn’t specify.”
“Where do people get this stuff?”
The boat bobs from side to side as they step onto it. The wood is hard and splintered, neither warm nor cold. They each take up an oar. Their strokes are in rhythm and he likes the meditative sound of their breathing mixed with the rippling of the water. The moon is high.
“I’d like to have a boat of my own,” he says. As if she’s been thinking about it for a long time she says, “you know what I’d like? A house with a garden. It’s the garden I want, really. A little sanctuary I could step into every morning. “There’d be a big tree I could climb. I’d collect all the old branches and in the winter I could build a fire. And I’d have a vegetable patch, so I –”
The boat shudders as it hits something. She drops her oar and it thuds against the hard wood. “What was that?” he says. They look around but see only dark water. “Probably just some driftwood,” she says. They wait as the boat steadies itself. Then she says, “we probably shouldn’t go too far out.” They put the oars down and for a while they sit and look at the moon and the lake. Everything around them is still. “That’s all right,” he says. “I’m all right here. I could stay here forever.”
“Not me,” she says. “Where would I build my fire?” He pretends his hands are binoculars and pans around the lake. “Yep. Only water around here.” Then something catches his eye. He sees two thin beams of pale light deep below the surface. He leans in closer but loses them in the fog. He squints. From up here he could swear they looked like the headlights of a car.