The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

they were being forced to inhale was the smell of blood, the hopeless exhalation of captured creatures who, even without comprehension, felt their fate approaching. Futilely, she tried to hold her breath. She could as easily have held back the sun that was just then rising in a riot of flame from behind a heap of a house across the way. That sun flung down on Liberty Street

Even into the uncertain weather of October, sailboats plied the lake, and steamers with crowded decks; regattas ruled the horizon, white-winged and thick as gulls, and across the whole of it one could often glimpse the mayor, a much-beloved Kentuckian named Carter Harrison, astride his horse, wearing a great-brimmed hat and waving triumphantly at his constituents, who gratefully waved back.

petty larceny

Roofs, more complicated than he had imagined from the ground (towers, doors, stripes of black tar where repairs made random designs). Streets slicing through dark brick, through grass, the winding cement lanes of the Fair, hedged and flowered. That sidewalk that moved very slowly like water creeping forward while people, amazed, stood and were carried along, stone-still. To the south the repeated silver sluice of many train tracks, and then, east, the lake! The endless lake, so big he felt his knees buckle at the sight of it, more serene than sky. Each time he went up, it was different, flowing lapis to turquoise, once or twice a gray-brown the color of dirt, edged with white ruffles.