Should have been paying attention to the hike up to the glacier. Instead, I wrote this, when we stopped and looked out over the ice.
When he was young, Anton was often left alone for too long at the cottage. When he ran low on film or medicine, he would anxiously watch his neighbor train his children to breathe under water. The boys would all wear black Speedos, the girls black one-pieces, everyone with a matching white swim-cap. The lake was glacial, fed by kam springs. Set in a stone-choked valley in the meadows, the sky was always overcast, and it was never warm. Their skin always emerged from the water stone-grey and blue-cold, many minutes after a dive. Half-suffocated and nearly exhausted, they would still gasp sodden smiles at each other across the lapping waves in a semaphore only they could interpret. In the center of the group, the father would smile approvingly, and hold his nose.
Anton started to take pictures from the roof of their cottage, his parents away in town. He would zoom in, until no-one except himself would have been able to decipher the grainy smear, desperate to capture the expression. The important thing to remember, Anton realized, was that the time before and afterwards - all the banter and the hyperoxygenation - was immaterial. Through the twin thickness of water and lense, he thought he could see them drifting, slowly. Weightless in concentration, carried gently in the freezing water like leaves balanced on a gust. The water so cold that even the warmth carried in the inviolably hot pocket of the mouth would be stolen, everything sucked away. Leaving finally only - whatever was left when the body was made to disappear. Rising through the surface again all alight with brusque exhiliration, so no-one would have to talk about it.
One day, Anton toppled from the roof, his eyes closed, and his camera in mid-air caught only a glimpse of his body arching above a stony meadow. Though he'd tried, he had been completely unable to hold his breath correctly.
When he was young, Anton was often left alone for too long at the cottage. When he ran low on film or medicine, he would anxiously watch his neighbor train his children to breathe under water. The boys would all wear black Speedos, the girls black one-pieces, everyone with a matching white swim-cap. The lake was glacial, fed by kam springs. Set in a stone-choked valley in the meadows, the sky was always overcast, and it was never warm. Their skin always emerged from the water stone-grey and blue-cold, many minutes after a dive. Half-suffocated and nearly exhausted, they would still gasp sodden smiles at each other across the lapping waves in a semaphore only they could interpret. In the center of the group, the father would smile approvingly, and hold his nose.
Anton started to take pictures from the roof of their cottage, his parents away in town. He would zoom in, until no-one except himself would have been able to decipher the grainy smear, desperate to capture the expression. The important thing to remember, Anton realized, was that the time before and afterwards - all the banter and the hyperoxygenation - was immaterial. Through the twin thickness of water and lense, he thought he could see them drifting, slowly. Weightless in concentration, carried gently in the freezing water like leaves balanced on a gust. The water so cold that even the warmth carried in the inviolably hot pocket of the mouth would be stolen, everything sucked away. Leaving finally only - whatever was left when the body was made to disappear. Rising through the surface again all alight with brusque exhiliration, so no-one would have to talk about it.
One day, Anton toppled from the roof, his eyes closed, and his camera in mid-air caught only a glimpse of his body arching above a stony meadow. Though he'd tried, he had been completely unable to hold his breath correctly.