Every evening, the school of Love-Is would come back to their inlet, and we would gather to watch them. Slow and clumsy on land, they took on a special lack of grace and speed in the water, wallowing and foundering as they went, such as to make them a most splendid comic spectacle.
We would point and laugh and make sport of them, until the day that Steve slipped and fell in. They were on him in a moment. I would not have believed they could move very quickly, nor could they. But their clumsiness and the awkwardness of their progress was so great that there was no escape, and he was swallered up whole, unnoticed, as if the life of a man was nothing compared to their ungainly thrashings.
And it wasn’t.
We never went back, but the memory haunts us all to this day. And I know that some day, each of us in their turn will go there and drop into those waters to disappear forever, unable to forget the grotesque end our friend has met, consumed by the horrible laughter that shook us as we watched him disappear forever.
Every evening, the school of Love-Is would come back to their inlet, and we would gather to watch them. Slow and clumsy on land, they took on a special lack of grace and speed in the water, wallowing and foundering as they went, such as to make them a most splendid comic spectacle.
We would point and laugh and make sport of them, until the day that Steve slipped and fell in. They were on him in a moment. I would not have believed they could move very quickly, nor could they. But their clumsiness and the awkwardness of their progress was so great that there was no escape, and he was swallered up whole, unnoticed, as if the life of a man was nothing compared to their ungainly thrashings.
And it wasn’t.
We never went back, but the memory haunts us all to this day. And I know that some day, each of us in their turn will go there and drop into those waters to disappear forever, unable to forget the grotesque end our friend has met, consumed by the horrible laughter that shook us as we watched him disappear forever.