At night you are meditating with shallow ease by the pond’s edge. It turns out the strong river is near, gurgling its backdrop. But now you are by the pond’s edge, and a tattered character comes up to you, their bald head and crooked teeth bobbing on an malformed crux. So you have an interchange where you talk about something immaterial and strangely familiar. And you get the feeling they're going to attack you. Because you have that prickly feeling, like the hair on your neck going up. So without warning, no warning at all, because you know this part is important in survival, you jump into the water. You jump into the clear, serene, flat pond to sink underwater where you waver in complete silence then surface where your opponent is jeering, and you think you hear the sound of a stone reverberating your skull.
You swim out to the middle of the pond to tread and think about the trees that tower along the banks, and the exuberant though quickly nonchalant safety being shrouded in dark, central mystery. To be as quiet as possible you sink again under the surface, as if you were to take another step into something consuming at the brink, thinking in fear the faraway electric and gasoline appearances are too far for voice to carry and sink to regard the deceiving canopy’s topside reflection where the moon wavers because the air is smoky, mind bleeding illicit nightmares or a den of dissonant truth. Then your body unfolds across the flat water where for a moment you’re unafraid, embracing an ever-pressing gravel undertow, receding from light into dark and back to light again. And then you look up, and the path is before you above the surface where the smoky moon still flickers, so with a little fight through the reeds you roll onto moss on the other side.