Came the dawn.

A dotted line man is sitting down to breakfast at a table covered with a white cloth. He brings a forkful of pancake, syrup and sausage from the plate to his mouth and chews it thoughtfully. He sips some coffee then reaches back to the plate for another bite. What a delight it is to sit in a cozy diner, comfortable and warm, and think of other things while watching the goings-on just outside.

But now he stands up rather abruptly, forgets about the letter on the table. He has seen something pass by the window. And he has had enough. Not enough of breakfast—but enough of breakfasts, of tables, of cloths, of pancakes, of important letters. He wants to be outside. He walks out the door but this is not the outside that he was looking for. Here there is the street and buildings and people. And the people are hypnotized by the street and the buildings and by a million other things. It is really no place at all for a man of faceless smoke. But what can he do? Where can he go?

An oak sign cites items to ingest: ham, leeks, chili, kale, mash, milk, mini gel hotcakes. He starts walking. Any direction will do. Either way will bring more signs and lights and buildings and businesses and all manner of things that are the hallmarks of civilization. But up ahead of him is something else, perhaps what interrupted his performance with that breakfast plate. Something with a distinctively vague glow surrounding it—a floating mini-sun of a blueish-yellowish hue. Nothing at all like the bus stop that he hurries by—simultaneously a useful necessity of modern living and a haven of depravity. A morally ambiguous fellow claiming to collect money for troubled children attempts a luring compliment: “Ah, King Comeliest!” But our taciturn outsider has his eyes and mind on that strange mystery erratically bouncing and zigging and zagging ahead—that nebulous form that seems to give him a homesick tingle.

He follows it up the street and into a library, that vast repository for cultural artifacts deemed by certain members of the community worthy of storage, preservation, and public access. The librarians and assistants work all day, all week, all year, but their filing and organizing is never done. It’s all so dreadfully necessary. Having momentarily lost the trail, our man, whose sense of his own intuitive capabilities has not yet quelled his curiosity for the thoughts of others, pulls down a book from the nearest shelf and opens it to a random page. A line of poetry at the top begins, “Oh, enigmatic elks”—he abruptly shuts the book. What use can words like this be when every single day is pushed into your face as though you were an untrained baby?

A bearded man with a stupid hat and two pairs of glasses, one hanging slightly lower on his face than the other, approaches the shelves breathing in: “What weather!”

Our gentle-man, constructed of loose feathers caught in a tornado, responds flatly, almost politely: “Splendid.”

His Ridiculousness offers, “Comet Lake is nigh!”

“Mind your own infernal business! Leave me alone with your lake and your weather!” storms off our orphaned slice of swiss cheese.

He moves up the street past so much purpose and duty. He steps into a grocery store wherein a handful of people are maundering up and down the aisles and a young man is stacking heads of lettuce in a bin. Our shapeless fellow shouts aloud, “Forget your eggs and your milk! Skip your morning coffee and your crossword puzzle! The lake is coming!” and off he goes leaving unchanged expressions upon the only two people to bother turning their heads: a secretive cashier at the nearest of the two registers and a small bald man holding a watermelon.

A busy bank is his next stop. A small line of people are waiting to be next to see to their dealings. Our incomplete nincompoop walks straight to the front of the line and announces, “Close your accounts! Sell your stocks, your bonds! The lake is coming! The lake is coming!” This time a slight shuffling of some feet and an imperceptible murmur follow the pronouncements. Again, he does not linger—he leaves immediately and continues randomly on his way.

He enters a church whose near-desolation fails to sap its seeming sense of pride and which does not deter him from marching right up to the pulpit, slamming his fist down and exclaiming, “Say your prayers! Count your blessings! The lake is coming! Can you believe it? Will you believe it?!” Our self-appointed orator is not surprised to see a man concentrating solely on the mop he pushes along the floor shooing away a woman smoking a cigarette and leaning on a decorative balustrade. Our faint shadow of a man bends forward looking for a moment toward nobody in particular, his eyelids fluttering: “Did such light once dwell here, too?” The man with the mop succeeds finally in motorizing the woman’s feet but at the expense of knocking into the innocent balustrade which falls over revealing itself to be a cheap plastic prop. The man no spotlight’s seen sheds an actual tear out of solidarity with the balustrade as though it was a metaphor for all of humanity and simultaneously another of its unfortunate victims.

Now our sullen wanderer has left the village and it is twilight. He sees the pale blue-in-yellow glow once again ahead of him, illuminating a sign that he is approaching. It reads, “To Chime Lake” and points the way down a wide path. As he walks along, his unsteady companion grows brighter, wider, higher. He can see it lighting up the sky and the path that leads him uphill past tall reeds and grasses. He quickens his pace and soon he is following the path downwards into darkness. He finds himself standing in wet sand, the land looming up above and all around him. The elusive glow has gone. There is not even a wind here. Just silence, a stillness, a ghostlike cinema.

“The lake has gone.” He walks around what was once underwater, sees his dotted silhouette on the ground, and screams up at nothing, “See me now, do you?! I shall endeavor to rise above it!”

He scrambles back up the path. At the upper ledge, he surveys the village that is itself now wholly enveloped in that wondrous, troubling glow—that glow which now seems to him like an animating fluid keeping everything in motion come what may. Its light allows him to see from here all the way back and into the library with its assistants moving to and fro in their organizing tasks, to the grocery store and its endless selling and restocking of human necessities, to the bank and its useful offices, to the empty church where a man has finished his mopping and gone home for the evening, and even into the diner at which our tender soul was earlier eating his breakfast. He watches as a waitress places a steak dinner in front of a seated patron. The plate is placed upon the white tablecloth. But the tablecloth hangs in the air as though by magic, everyone in the room blindly accepting that there must be something holding it up. There on the floor near the patron’s foot is the open envelope containing the letter. Nearby, a hemlock ignites. To no one: “I will find this village a proper table if it kills me.”

Moonlight shines upon the small village. But here there is no wind, no movement. Here the moonlight is completely absorbed by something darker than the night. An empty marker, a blackened ray of petrified light.

Moonlight shines upon a small village.  But here there is not a person in sight—the thought of a lake, ever so slight.