The lake is a black film, and decayed strips of what was once wood clog its surface. When Turk looks at this, his intestines lock up. He can feel sphincters tighten and crinkle, contorting the topography of his gut into unmappable collapse. Old Haven in general, and this lake in particular, are simply too fucking grotesque for Turk’s viscera to handle. This is why he is trying to confine his focus to the fisherman’s oars and their stable, smooth arcs.
And sure, those oars do comfort him in the predictability of their motion, yet each time they slap the water’s surface the lake shudders; it coughs up plumes of diseased dust that burst into Turk’s nostrils and rappel up sheer cliffs of mucoid snot. Once the dust reaches his brain, it overwhelms him with a horrific aroma that lingers for a second before going away. Then the oars hit the water and the cycle begins again.
Each new dust plume seems a little bigger, a little sicker, than the last. Turk is starting to freak out. He turns around, breaking his gaze from the circling oars and gluing it to the tiny, ruined house in the distance. He keeps it fixed there for several seconds. He takes in the distant shore. The giant lumpen trees. The mutant bushes. Everything. The whole semi-congealed biomass.
Then Turk glances back at the fisherman, who sits behind him. He is rowing backwards to make the boat go forwards.
“Hey, how . . . how much longer?”
The fisherman clears his throat.
“What?”
“I said, how much longer?” Turk’s voice is unstable. His larynx ripples, trembles. “We’ve been . . . I mean, it’s been . . . it’s, we’ve been here, rowing here, for a while now.”
The fisherman laughs. The sound is throaty.
“A while? We’ve only been rowing for four years.”
“Yeah, but . . . four years is a . . . long time, right?”
“You got to be patient.”
So Turk looks back at the far shore. It doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. It never does.
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