Slow rise through sleep to dream. Awareness. Dreaming? Yes. How strange.Looking up through clear cold water, the sky wrinkling and distorting with the ripples skating over the surface. A waterbug passes, skating on the thin liminal divide between drowning and breathing. Drowning. No, no, I am breathing --
-- and like that, breathing, gasping, looking from above, now. At the edge of the pool. A clear lens, deceptively shallow. Grass-shadows paint black across the wind-wrinkled water. Past the surface, below, below --
-- half-buried in the weed, in the black mud, in the algae, it is barely visible, a glint of ivory. The socket of an empty eye stares blind up at the surface. Around it, behind it, obscured and revealed by the sway of the weed, there are --
-- bones underwater.
