Temenos

Previously published with Querencia Press Summer 2025 Anthology

September

Meredith breathes in the muddy lake and scrunches her nose. The argil smell is stale and pungent, and Meredith can’t decide if it’s always been that way.

“What’s a summer?” she thinks. It isn’t this place. These stony beaches and lake edges so close she swears if she got enough zip behind it, she could throw a stone across the span of the water.

What’s La Jolla?

Some chintzy sun-faded stucco in bubble gum? Days spent sun-sick and delirious, but somewhere different.

Somewhere new.

The feel of the sand left in her shoes. The smell of food braised with soy sauce and Sprite. A glut of faces all varied and dizzyingly unique. The faithful hush of an ocean she never knew could look and feel so infinite spread before her. That sense that everything is more. So much more than home.

And there the question sits since she got back: What is home?

Meredith gets up from the metal bench beneath the pavilion, takes her shoes off, and starts down the hill toward the shore of Long Branch Lake, thinking about home. Half-way down she passes the lake’s only bathroom reeking of piss and lake water. It has no roof, and walls barely taller than she. Some ten feet from the bathroom entrance, a trio of spouts to wash off the lake muck and sand are in use. There are two people there. A mother and a child.

Meredith likes the pair together, and as she makes her way down toward them, they see Meredith. She smiles and takes a wide berth to get past.

“Day’s mostly done,” the drawl of the voice is long and raspy. The mother is smiling at Merideth when she says it.

“You from these parts?” Meredith laughs.
“Born ‘n raised,” the mother says.
“Me too.”
That’s not right. Meredith knows everyone here. It’s hard not to in their little prairie town. “Left when I was probably your age,” the mother presses the button below the spout

where her son continues to rinse off, “damn near a lifetime ago I figure.”
“Your people still here?” A nagging feeling begins to eat away at Meredith. Something

about the mother, but she can’t make sense of it. As if she can see the mother with her son, she can take the word “mother” and affix it to the woman before her, but it isn’t quite right.

“They’re around, yeah. You know the Dunns?”
“You mean ol’ Mr. Dunn and Patty,” Meredith asks, “Those Dunns?”
The mother nods, “That’s them.”
It’s all off. Meredith can feel it looking at this stranger. Anxious energy pushing the

button on the shower, hair pulled back tight and cinched through the opening of her baseball cap dyed a sun-washed daisy.

“Yeah, left when I was eighteen,” the mother says it more to herself while looking past the beach toward the water, “lake’s still pretty like I remember.”

The mother leans against the shower pole, bearing her weight on her back leg as she taps her other foot. She wears an unpretentious pair of canvas plimsolls in white.

“Do you actually miss it?” Meredith scoffs.

The mother turns back and presses the button on the water spout again and the boy howls in delight, “I figure it’s still home,” she pauses as if surprised she’s admitting it, “Maybe like part of me still ain’t left.”

Merideth spots a golden line of jewelry caressing an ankle, brown and devoid of tan lines. Something about it makes her blush when she sees it. She registers the image just before the boy starts flinging water in every direction, thrashing like a pig in mud.

Translucent strands of blond hair cling to the boy’s head, creating a part straight down the middle that frames the edges of his face. Every few seconds, two tusks of ivory flash from under his lips. He gnashes the water, biting down so hard the snap of his teeth causes the muscles at the base of Merideth’s skull to tighten. His face is plump and red with childhood brutishness. The boy catches Meredith frowning at him and grins.

The boy bends his knees as another blast of water rains down. It only takes Merideth following the toothy menace to understand: a golden stream sputters out from the bottom of the boy’s swim trunks hitting his knees, shins, and bare feet. Meredith grimaces and looks towards the mother hoping she’s noticed; the mother returned to gazing across the quivering sheet of glass at the unbroken wall of rocks and foliage cradling the lake from the other side. The boy yanks a towel off his parent’s shoulder to dry himself when she doesn’t move to press the spout.

And there, glowing underneath terry cloth, the mother’s bare shoulders outlined against the lake and tree line behind her. Delicately traced and freckled in golden brown, the umber skin of the mother’s shoulders curves inward forming the frame of her collarbone. Meredith sucks in her breath following the nape of the mother’s neck up to her jaw and then to her ears; a single, exquisite line. To see it so carelessly– a sybaritic, elegant formation of flesh and muscle. The

ease, the second nature of it all, sets Merideth’s face, then her body, on fire. The woman turns back to Meredith, lips parted in a beckoning half-smile,

“Do me a favor, hun,”

***
The beach is manmade: a melange of lake bed stones and pebbles mixed with silt and

then mixed again with clay from the lake, covers what used to be a stony alcove. It’s certainly not La Jolla.

Meredith keeps toying with the idle thought. She pictures the ocean again, and the beaches, and eternal boardwalks and tries to ignore the hems and haws of the boy sitting next to her.

“When’s she coming back?” he asks without an ounce of uncertainty.
Meredith shrugs, “Dunno, soon. She isn’t gonna leave you.”
The son, Wally, picks up a smooth stone and stands up next to Meredith to survey the

beach. Most of the visitors have already packed and gone. What’s left are the miserable few too day-drunk to leave when they still had legs to. Meridith, then Wally, see a man wobbling back to his car after a day of poor fishing.

“Don’t even think about it,” Meredith says as soon as Wally sets himself flat-footed in the sand like a pitcher.

“Think about what?” Wally feigns a sincere tone then winds up and whips the rock at the drunk coming up the beach. It grazes left just missing the man’s head, before hitting the water and cutting on the surface and out of sight. The man doesn’t break stride, he walks as if Wally hadn’t nearly embedded a rock into his unsuspecting forehead.

Meredith grabs Wally by one of his ankles and yanks the boy’s leg out from under him. His back thuds into the sand next to her and he makes the sort of noise that sounds like lungs being deflated.

“You’re a little cretin, you know that?” Meredith tries to sound angry.

Between barks of air returning to his lungs and an infectious cackle, Wally rolls from side to side ignoring Meredith.

She smiles in spite of herself. Wally’s brutish charm is just that, charming, “You always get away with stuff like this, you little shit?”

Meredith takes a handful of sand and squashes it into Wally’s hair, Wally howls like he did at the water spout.

“Can I go?” He asks when the laughing recedes and he cleans the sand from his hair.
“I dunno,” Meredith answers, “you could, I guess.”
Thinking of the pang of hunger she felt seeing Wally’s mother against the backdrop of the

lake Meredith asks, “Does your mom do this a lot?”
Wally shrugs, “Not really, but I know people think she’s weird back home.” “Where’s home?”
Wally spits a bit of sand and snorts something up into the back of his throat and

swallows, “California.”
Is that it? The effortless air of sensual detachment? The energy, the playfulness. The

beauty. Like someone perfectly themself and more. “Where in California?”

Wally scans the beach searching for something, “Oxnard.”

Her hopes dampen hearing a name she’s never heard before, but Meredith follows up, “Is that near La Jolla?”

Wally shakes his head, “I don’t know what La Jolla is.”

A strip of land made of limestone and clay juts into the lakefront, neatly dividing the beach into two sections: where Meredith and Wally are sitting on the beach and the slipway. The jetty extends nearly a hundred yards into the lake, and at its very tip, Wally and Meredith transfix on a lone figure standing in the waning afternoon facing the water.

“Can I go now?”

“Your mom said she’d come get you,” Even as she’s saying it, Meredith doesn’t know why she agreed to watch Wally in the first place.

Why would she say yes?
Because of the way she grinned at Meredith.
Because of the way she said it.
“Do me a favor, hun.” like she was sharing a secret with Meredith. Some unspoken

agreement that doing so would make it clear to Meredith why she’s enthralled by the mother in the first place.

The pair don’t notice the drunk approach. The shadow of an unsteady posture darkens out the sun and Wally and Merideth look up to see a dirty face and a pair of eyes incapable of focusing. Meredith shoots up and grabs Wally by the arm, pulling him behind her.

“You need something, mister?”

“Wha--” the fisherman hiccups and squares his shoulders. Wally giggles from behind as the two watch the drunkard try to steady his head.

Meredith takes a step back with Wally, balls her free hand into a fist, “Mister, I’m gonna ask nicely, best be on your way.”

Wally can’t stop laughing through his teeth and Meredith can feel him try to stifle the body tremors running through him. The fisherman squints the lets out a soft burp,

“Bah fin, just trinen’get home.”
Meredith and Wally step to one side, “Sounds good, mister,” she says.
The drunk waves his hand as if shooing away the pair, “Never--” the fisherman stutters

and burps, then with a sudden grimace, he retches the afternoon from his stomach at Merideth’s feet.

“Gross,” Wally yells in complete enjoyment as Meredith curses under her breath.

“Better now,” the fisherman hiccups and grins before he starts back toward the hill stepping in the mush and gummy stew of sour beer and deli meats, past Meridith, towards whatever he calls home. He turns to the two still dumbfounded by the vomit, and tips a hat he isn’t wearing.

“This place rules,” Wally says, “People here are so weird. Nobody’s this fun back home.”

“Fun,” Meredith is looking down at the spatter of vomit staining her pants, “You’re not from here, it’s only fun because you’re a tourist.”

Wally picks up another stone from the sand and hands it to Meredith, “Whatever, bet you can’t hit him before he gets up the hill.”

The fisherman is just starting up the slope toward the parking lot overlooking the beach. It’s not a steep hill, but one could assume after a day of heavy drinking, the slope feels as treacherous as K2. Meredith rubs the smooth lakestone between her thumb and index finger thinking with enough zip, she could hit him. But why would she do that?

Because Wally, like his mother, is different. From this place, from these people, from Meredith. Because throwing the rock would be funny, and different, and something she would do if she wasn’t from here–if she was a tourist like them. Maybe, just for a second she can be from somewhere else. Meredith plants herself to throw the stone at the man inching his way up the slope when a raspy drawl breaks her concentration,

“Wally give you any guff?”

Meredith turns to see Wally’s back racing toward his mother. She is glowing against the twilight and Meredith doesn’t know if the mother is real. Wearing the same half-smile, she seems more an apparition until she scoops up Wally for a hug and makes her way toward Meredith. Meredith looks back at the fisherman to find him in nearly the same place, and lets the stone fly. It arcs high before coming straight down on the man and hitting him in the small of his back. He doesn’t notice and continues his journey as if nothing outside of the step he took and the one he’s about to take is present in his world.

Wally howls again, and his mother makes her way to Meredith, “He has a way, don’t he?” Meredith isn’t thinking about Wally though, “Why’d you leave?”
The mother gives a thoughtful look, “Thought I needed more, I guess.”

“Do you ever think about coming back for good?”
The mother smiles a different smile at the question and shakes her head, “Too much time,

too much change. Still, sometimes it feels like the lake still got a magic in it.”
Meredith has a sense she isn’t saying anything here has changed, and that seems a small

tragedy to her. Like losing something precious, but not remembering what it is or how you lost it. It leaves an indelible absence.

She doesn’t wait for Meredith to respond.

“You know, before that poor man who got chewed up by the motorboat, I used to swim to the other shore when the sun went down.”

She’s wistful, almost mournful, “Back when this was home.”

Meredith perks up, opens her mouth, then frowns, “Why would you swim to the other shore?

The mother smiles, “You never been?”
She doesn’t answer Meridith’s question, instead, she turns to her impish son and holds her

hand out to leave.
Wally bears his teeth up at Meredith as he follows his mother, “I told you this place

rules.”
The pair passes the fisherman just before he reaches the top and then disappear over the

crest of the hill, leaving Meredith with her thoughts and the silent lake of magic. She wades ankle deep into the lake water, thinking she prefers the calm of it to the anxious pull of the Pacific tide.

“Home.”
The word slipping past her lips and into the air makes the empty beach feel less lonely.

***
Meredith can’t stop thinking about what the mother said; maybe there is magic in a place

like this, or maybe magic is just an approximation. Either way, she decides to head out to the jetty where she and Wally watched that solitary visage of the mother and wondered what it was that compelled her to leave her son with a stranger.

Standing at the edge of the jetty, Meredith tries to breathe deep and take the brown magic lake in. She listens for the water to speak. For the wind to whisper. For anything, really. The lake

doesn’t move, shifting lazily against the rocky outcropping as if to shrug at Meredith’s expectation for something more. She picks up another stone, flat and smooth, winds up, and flings it across the water. It skips once before it plops into the water and disappears.

You’ve never been? She hears the words repeat. What could be there? More clay and woods? Leaves just like the ones on the trees on this side? Human debris left inert for decades, slowly disintegrating back into the marrow of the earth? From the jetty, the other shore is vague and blurry, and Merideth guesses at least a quarter mile from where she’s standing. It couldn’t really be anything other than that, could it?

Maybe the magic is in the water.

Meredith doesn’t think past the first thought, she just jumps headfirst with the easy grace of a child raised to swim. She breaks the surface and kicks out as far as she can hold her breath. She opens her eyes beneath water and finds she wades through an undulating haze. Extending her arms in a breaststroke, Meredith cuts through the brown veil of silt and clay as if passing through some ephemeral nowhere. She doesn’t notice the breath in her lungs as she swims further and deeper. She doesn’t know how long she’s been at it before the need to breathe feels like she’ll die if she doesn’t. Meredith breaches the water, gasping and alive.

It doesn’t make sense.
The jetty must be more than two hundred yards away from her. Meredith is exactly

halfway between the beach where she met Wally and his mother and the other side of the lake. Could she have gotten that far? She looks across the remaining span of the lake toward the other side.

“Why not?” Meredith says.

Turning away from the beach and jetty where she came, Meredith continues on toward the other side of the lake, wondering if the path she traces is the same one the mother took in some era where everything was sepia-toned and hazy.

Fen, morass, wetland, bog--she keeps searching for words that fit better than lake. Swamp is too obvious. Bog seems too mean-spirited, but calling it a lake feels too close to calling it an ocean. As if this place shares something with the shores of the Pacific–it doesn’t. Swimming in its bosom, Meredith is at least sure of that distinction. The odor of it, the sting, and earthiness make Meridith think of mud, primordial and untouched sitting deep at the bottom of an ancient trench.

She pictures a torso she saw once several summers ago when she was slight and couldn’t understand what she was seeing then: flesh split vertically at the waist up to the base of a pale throat, lifeless and open. Were there innards, or organs?--She can’t remember. A sodden mass of flesh dragged out of the lake by trawl. An accident, a family, mourners, and lookers-on covering their mouths and shielding their faces when they see it too. Weird and tragic to be sure, but home nonetheless.

“Home,” she says it like there’s an alchemy to uttering those sounds in this place. As if she’s conjuring some part of that body disintegrated into chum and lake muck, and willing it to show her something. She is met with nothing more than the sound of her arms crashing against the water and the stillness of a summer at its end.

When she reaches the far shore, Meredith drags herself, clothes sopping and heavy, to the nearest patch of warm earth and collapses into the ground. She is asleep before her head hits the sand.

***

Her skin is stippled and freezing in the white glow of the moon. There are no clouds overhead. A blanket of gaseous light bears down on her in quiet expectation. She feels her toes, burning and cold, then her feet kicking in the darkness. Then a jolt of blood biting her fingers, her chest, and finally her cheeks.

Meredith squirms up to her elbows then sits upright in damp sand on a stretch of embankment on the farthest edge south of Long Branch Lake. The jetty where she dove headlong into the water is a pencil-thin line obscured by darkness at the farthest reaches of what she makes out in the moonlight.

She is freezing and tired and only now realizing how careless she’s been while trying to figure out how not to die of exposure. And there, folded next to her: dry clothing, socks, and a pair of shoes. Overcome with cold, and with what feels like an automatic physiological response, Merideth strips herself down to nothing. No towel, but the air, even as late as it is, feels pleasant enough that warmth rushes into her as she strips away each waterlogged piece of cloth. Her skin is glowing and nearly pearlescent standing against the black lake. Reaching down for the first piece of clothing she can find, Meredith’s gaze levels against the still water, infinitely serene and unmoved by her presence. She does not sense something lurking just beneath the surface, or as though somewhere unseen, a set of glowing eyes watch her like prey. No, the feeling that creeps into her is one she only associates with the sort of anxious divinity she felt looking at the rolling tide of the ocean receding back past the horizon. An almost abject serenity bound in isolation and terror as though the impenetrable lake has taken her as its own.

But why? Why is she here now, standing at the water’s edge stripped bare like a newborn?

Because she’s never been.

A voice, not her voice and not a voice from within; a woman’s voice, clear and forbearing. Meredith tries to make out the words, if there are any, but the voice pulls back passing behind her towards a thicket of trees through the forest at her back. She for an instant nearly turns to follow the voice into the dark, but remembers her nakedness. Standing on the lakeshore nude and freezing, Merideth instead reaches for the pile of dry clothing folded neatly at her feet.

A cotton pullover, whose color is indistinguishable in the moonlight. From what Merideth can discern, it is heavy and fleece-lined. When she feels the fabric on her skin, she is hit with the rush of safety and comfort that only comes from trying on new clothes for the first time, magnified by the fact that she was not fully aware of how cold she actually was before she put the sweater on. Meredith then picks up the pair of dry pants folded along with the sweater: denim, not unlike what she was wearing before. She slides her legs into the jeans, and they fit like a miracle. She pulls up the socks stuffed individually with each shoe and finally notices the shoes.

A pair of white plimsolls.

Finally, Meredith turns to face the tree line set back against the far end of the shore. The dogwood and maple give her nothing but the occasional sigh at the moonlight breeze.

“Hello?”
There is no answer. Meredith waits a beat then tries again.
“Is anyone there?” Her stomach sinks with each second that passes undisturbed. She is

uneasy in the silence, not from fear, but more a wild compulsion to know. She calls out again, “You can come out.”

At once, just at the edge of her periphery Merideth catches something. Movement, but as she turns her head to look the movement seems like moonlight creeping between the shadows of leaves and branches. Then, maybe a hundred or so feet into the trees, the light moves glowing-- passing from one spot to another. The motion is deliberate, living.

Still, Merideth can’t make out what it is exactly. She forces herself to inch closer to the light. Little by little, Meredith makes it to the back edge of the shore, bracing up against the forest. She thinks first to step into the darkness in hopes of following the light, but something about the thought feels wrong. Not wrong in that reptilian way, but as if to cross the threshold of the trees would be profane. Like she is violating something sacred. So, Merideth leans up against a sturdy maple that peeks out of the natural border of the forest and tries to focus on following the moving light.

To her horror, there is something--after a minute passes of Merideth straining to penetrate the bramble and separate the natural dance of the forest for something “other”, she sees it. In full view, cutting between a large clearing of trees and low bushes, walking away from her--further into the darkness. Light, gray, and at first, formless.

Delicate shoulders covered at their points by a gown, flaxen, nearly translucent hair braided to the waist. The shape of a head held slightly tilted up. The figure doesn’t bob or sway as it moves further away--it floats, gliding. Meredith’s breath catches in her tongue and teeth, and the space around her heart tightens as she begins to shiver. She tries to fight back the spasm rolling through her body as she watches the figure disappear and reappear among the dogwoods and maples. She hears it again. Something like a voice, perfect and almost soothing.

“I see you.” it seeps into her mind and sinks down into her stomach as her legs give out. Meredith slumps against the tree, her vision darkening. The soil around the tree is soft and

inviting, and Meredith’s body completely submits to exhaustion nestled in the hollow of roots and grass. The woods fade from her mind and as they do, the gray light, soft shoulders, and braided flax fade also into black repose.

***
Incessant, staccato trilling wakes her, or at least pulls her mind out from the depths of

heavy sleep. Merideth lifts herself not from the hollow of the tree, but once from the sands of the very beach where everything transpired the day before.

She greets the misty lake before her and is met with an affable silence. An equally drowsy sun causes a sheet of delicate mist to rise from the lake’s surface--it is sluggish like the rest of the morning. As though the day is trying to wake itself; slowly yes, but surely. Still out of sight, and far enough off, the angry braying of fishing boat motors are swallowed up by the nothing of morning air.

Lost in her wondering about whether anything really happened the night before, or if she is just waking from some heat-induced fever dream, a cicada song reverberates into Meredith’s ears somewhere among overgrown weeds and damp lake soil. She feels it slither down her spine. As real as it’s ever been.

The sun is still hidden somewhere low and far away, but the day has started. The sky is obstructed by clouds that smell like rain waiting just beneath Meredith’s nose. She can hear the low rumble of cars and semis coming and going somewhere south of where she is, Highway 36. She is so close to home, she hadn’t realized she could hear from the lake if she had ever thought to listen. Getting up, still dressed in the clothes she found the night before, Meredith follows the footsteps back up the hill the way Wally, his mother, and the drunk all went.

Towards the white hum of morning traffic. Towards her still-sleeping town, immutable and now more exasperating than it’s ever been. Home, towards mangled streets and sober edifices stirring restless, their voices reaching Meridith through dust and ash. She is hearing them for the first time and can’t help but muse,

“This place rules.”