REFLECTING POOL — YONG-YU HUANG
/In mid-July we watched the gleaming surface of the lake swallow a menagerie of color, unnatural in its cadences of light: the lovebirds that a man dropped from his rowboat and then the golden dog that dove in after them. It didn’t make a splash, dropped like a comma in the water. The night before, I had let my favorite denim jacket sink, the one with my initials cross-stitched in tangerine thread across the front pocket; around me, everyone else was tossing things into the water. Loose mother-of-pearl buttons, greening pennies, the crumpled red skin of an empty Coke. Afterwards, we sat on the dock and sucked on neon popsicles, the colors swirling on the surface of the mossy water.
That year, the camp guide told us that the lake was meromictic—layers upon layers clinging to each other but never mixing. They lost a camper sometime in the hairpin bend of summer too, and for weeks, her bright yellow swimsuit was plastered across every front page. When we sat around the campfire to pray for her return, the lake flooded up to our shins and left a permanent ring of red around our ankles. Someone mentioned ringworm and lifebuoys; I stopped wearing socks after that. Still, I wanted to stay out there with them all summer, lounging in the gritty sand and letting water seep into my mouth. But we drove back down the mountain roads, past the copse of trees lined with golden streamers from the night before, past the turtle sanctuary with its odd silences and empty green pools, past the gas station and the sitcoms playing on the TV by the slushy machine, and I said goodbye somewhere in between that.
When they dredged her out of the water in the winter, we were already long gone. The body had floated all the way up to the top layer, and someone had spotted a pack of deer fleeing south, away from the foggy ice and the half-open eyes underneath. I read about it in the paper—the limp mass sprawled across the front page—and then I called the others. We ordered wicker baskets of miniature lotions to cover the last of the sunburns from lying belly-down on the dock, our elbows rubbed raw on the wooden slats. They came in strange, exotic scents like Buttered Tartar, Cream of Cinnamon, Mango Incense. We rubbed them into our skin anyway; it was always better to start water-proofing early.
The next year we met at the same lake, skin gleaming and still curious to see what the lake had to offer. It was a morbid fascination, but we agreed—water that didn’t take on the appearance of anything else was something to be explored. I thought of the dog and the lovebirds and the fistfuls of hair we had lost the year before, endless shades of peacock blue. Come on now, it’s getting late, someone called out, but we had already turned away, our faces damp and eager in the silty heat.
Yong-Yu Huang is a Taiwanese student living in Malaysia. Her work is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Passages North, and Counterclock Journal, among others, and has been recognized by Princeton University, The Kenyon Review, and Columbia College Chicago. She is the winner of the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and the prose winner for the 2021 Counterclock Awards. In her free time, she enjoys listening to Studio Ghibli soundtracks and sitting by bonfires on the beach.
