The Spirit of the Lake

A reclusive watchman, Tom, keeps vigil beside a mirror-smooth lake whose mirrored surface is rumored to fracture the minds of those who dare to live alone with its echoing hush; when he discovers a half-conscious girl sprawled among the sun-cracked salt flats, he ferries her limp body to his cedar-shingled hermitage where wind chimes of driftwood clack like warning bones. Days bleed into nights of hush and halftones: her laughter drips into the hollows of his solitude, seeding hallucinations of love so fierce he tastes copper on the air. Yet the lake’s hush whispers poison—she must desire another—so with eyes furnace-bright he banishes her into the bruised dusk, the slam of the cabin door a gunshot across the heart. Only when dust settles does truth shimmer: the imagined rival is her brother, a mirage born of jealous starlight, and Tom, choking on regret, sprints barefoot across thorn-scabbed trails to reclaim the woman whose absence has already begun to erode his sanity, the lake at last releasing its grip in a final sigh of moonlit reconciliation.