[guernicamag]

Now they were losing last light. Their boat had drifted so far into Lake Otseva’s center that they could no longer make out the shore. But there was the island. All their lives it had been somewhere beyond the edge of sight, and now they watched it: a far gray glimpse growing darker, as if the roots of its unknown woods were drawing night up from the earth. It humped blackly out of the distant water, unreachable as a whale’s back. And beyond it stretched the lake. And all around: the lake. And beneath them the rocking of its waves.

At their feet the tools they’d taken scraped back and forth against the skiff floor: axe, hatchet, cleaver, pick. Each one freshly sharpened. In the bow, behind their backs: a brush hook’s moon-bright blade swayed against the sky. Beneath it, a cloud of netting. And, nestled there to keep from breaking, wrapped in wool blankets to warm the life in them: two dozen eggs, a gestating nestful of yolky souls. Out of the stern, the fishing rod jutted, its line lipped by the waves—tugged and slacked, tugged and slacked—going down down down into the black belly of the lake where its huge hook hung, gripping in its barb the red fist of a fresh goose heart.

Waterborne by Josh Weil - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

Image by Kim Keever. Hawaii, 2013. Courtesy the artist.

[nationalbook]

PREVIEW of Josh Weil’s forthcoming book The Great Glass Sea! Weil was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree in 2009.