The Lakehouse
Deep below the lake’s murky surface, there sits—in tact—a house. A two-story structure of Carpenter Gothic details like elaborate wooden trim bloated to bursting. Its front yard: purple loosestrife. Its inhabitants: alligator gar, bull trout, and pupfish. All glide past languidly: out of window sashes and back inside door frames. It is serene, and it is foreboding. Curtains of algae float gossamer to and fro. Pictures rest clustered atop credenzas. A chandelier is lit, intermittently, by freshwater electric eels. And near a Victrola, white to the bone, a man and a woman waltz in a floating embrace.
Change of Plan
Every time he checks the blueprints, something’s different. When he questions the architect, he sneers, as if to demand “What are ya talkin’ about bub; you were on board with the designs – just yesterday.” But upon today’s examination, the roofline has taken on a monstrous fortress-like appearance. Worse yet, each day, it continues to grow in strangeness. Now, as the house is complete, he does not question its organic shapeshifting. He lies in bed aware—as walls fold and floors slide around him. The house lives, takes on new forms, and against his will, locks its doors and windows.
Connecting Stars Like Dots
When I was a kid, I would sleepwalk. I remember having a recurring dream. Today, it seems to be such a mature dream, intuitive and analogous, for a boy of about eight years old. I dreamt I would slice an orange. And nature would whisper to me that when one slices an orange it displays 13 sections. Always 13. Only 13. But the orange I sliced had one section more—or less.
I would begin to sleepwalk, the gauze masking Lazarus’ eyes bound tight around my own: making me maneuver the furniture in our house as if by radar, blindly gliding past hard corners and pointy objects.
My siblings, Mom, Dad, were use to my meanderings. I would find a presence, sense a group of my brothers and sisters as they sat watching Johnny Carson, hee hawing at his stand-up comedy routine. I stood there, too, mumbling, asking them for help in a language only the desperate can understand. “Why,” I’d ask simply, pleadingly. “Why is my orange different? Why am I different?”
I would feel an arm drag me to the side or a kick in the butt almost take me to my knees.
“Go to bed, Keith!”
“Stop blocking the TV.” “Mom, Keith’s at it again…”
A hand, assuredly my surrogate mother, Kathleen, gently guided me on my precarious walk back to the orange grove and the knowledge even then, on some subconscious level, that all was not right with me; something was wrong, because my surroundings told me so. I was witness to Mom’s beatings on Kathleen. Just a kid, I was already sensing the dread to be caught up in Mom’s manic moods. I had begun wetting the bed and being punished sarcastically by Mom on each occurrence. And the dream came slice after slice after slice.
One night, it took me to the place of the big “orange ball” we kids played with… when around two in the morning, my twin Kenny awoke and went looking for me, finding me standing at the free- throw line staring blankly at the basketball hoop in our backyard.
I would surely shoot and miss.
I relate still to this image, me standing outside in the dead of night, head cocked slightly upward, blind eyes unlit by a phantom moon, while my mind connected stars like dots, hoping to map out the answer to my riddle through some astrological means. I could sense the half-horse, half-man archer, Sagittarius, lull me in my trance with the moral principles and laws of the universe… pointing his bow and arrow in the direction I was to follow, however far, however near.
Keith Hoerner (BS, MFA) lives, teaches, and pushes words around in Southern Illinois, USA. He is frequently featured in lit journals (75+ to date, including decomP, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, and Litro—to name just a few). He is founding editor of the Webby Award recognized Dribble Drabble Review, and his memoir, The Day the Sky Broke Open, is a recent Best Book and American Writing Award Finalist. A collection of short fiction and poetry, entitled Balancing on the Sharp Edges of Crescent Moons, publishes later this year.
