"It's Just a Lake"
A microfiction based on a photograph I once took
“It’s just a lake.”
That’s what the locals told anyone who came around asking about it. “Just a lake.” They didn’t see the point in clouding up that true but incomplete fact with inconvenient details: the missing livestock and incautious drunks, the children stricken mute for life by something they’d glimpsed once and never again, or the “origin story” — of Old Man Kearney and the curious pet he’d cared for since it fell from the sky, splat at his feet, on that gray morning over 75 years ago…