Sunlight was just beginning to illuminate the vast surface of the lake and send needles of light shooting through the cypress trees.  The mist curled up from the water.  Sengha took a sip of black coffee and kept the cup close to her face, the steam licking at the tip of her nose and cheeks.  The strong aroma of evergreen sap blended against her palate like the cardamom of Turkish coffee.  Her breath escaped her lips in frozen cloudlets.

      It was Saturday, a window in the week that Sengha savored like a soft candy.  Her mother would sleep in past noon, haggard from five days that droned away, leaving Sengha to soak a separate world through her pores without the poison of intense disappointment.  Sengha’s muddy ritual of encircling the water, walking her route around the lake before the night air retreated, was a space of her own.  Spattered a hundred shades of gray under the frigid breath of February, the water, the path, the sky met Sengha with life and color:  ruddy veins in cedar branches, the languid blue sliding down a heron’s back, sap that crystallized in the dirt into gems of brown sugar… all lay hidden in the shadows of cold mist, waiting.  She plunged each foot into a mud-caked boot and rose from the steps, sloshing coffee onto spirals of flaking white paint as she set down her cup.  Today she hoped for hot air balloonists.

       The grass was covered in a shroud of ice that crunched under her feet as she made her way to the edge of the lake.  Sengha stopped and looked out over the water, dark from decades of leaves on its bottom that were pressed and preserved under its immense, cold weight.

       The lake was old and unmoving, its age and depth pulling the surface flat like a black windowpane that mirrored the placid winter sky.  It was like an oracle, surrounded by an ancient brotherhood of trees that stood silent, shielding the water from any disturbance from the fields on the other side.

       Sengha and her mother had few neighbors, and the most they ever saw of them was the hazy evidence of their warm living rooms, filling the air with smoke and the perennial scent of winter.  Directly across the lake, like the shadowy illusion of an elk amidst tree trunks, was a house that Sengha often stared right past without realizing it.  Because it was so well-concealed and distant, she rarely noticed its faded red siding, though she often listened, subdued, to the melodies that stretched through the air from its windows, tepid with too much patience.  This morning, she thought she saw a figure leap from the front porch of the house with the fluid movements of an eagle and disappear into the trees.

      “That boy has the heart of a vulture,” Sengha’s mother had said as if she were talking about a butcher shop that sold sausages of questionable content.  “You’d be wise to stay away from him.” Sengha would let out a breath and step out the doorway.

      Sengha’s mother, who saw her first silver hair as the immediate predecessor of a white marble mausoleum, read death in everything.  The boy Julius, son of the violinist who lived in the red house, was no different.    

      Sengha gently navigated the shore, stepping over the hoof prints of deer wedged into the mud.  Raccoons, having pried open clams with locksmith fingers the night before, had littered the bank with pearly shells, naked and clean, glittering like fish scales.  Every so often, Sengha bent to pluck one from the sticky ground, her dark hair spilling from the hood of her coat.  With each wrinkled footstep, the collective voice of life grew in her ears, nibbling at the morning silence: insects thawing their raspy wings, the clawed feet of birds scratching bark as they gripped their perches, and the distant gasping of hot air balloons.

      Bending toward two shining wings of a clamshell, she caught the reflection of a troupe of them on the surface of the lake.  Balloons were sailing over the water, inhaling fiery air as whales trumpet mist through waves, their flames winking like a swarm of fireflies.  They glided as if hung from a cloud, iridescent bubbles bursting from behind a curtain of gloom.  Standing up, Sengha noticed a small metal boat with a single passenger, surrounded by the vivid reflections of the hot air balloons on the black surface of the lake. 

      Julius sat, his elbows folded back onto his thighs, quietly leaning forward over some object obscured by distance. Other mornings, she would have edged away to steal glances from behind a tree, but this morning felt different.  His boat was turning around, spinning a subtle waltz amidst the images of the balloons, and before Sengha realized what she was doing, he had already noticed her swaying hand and plucked a paddle from between his feet.  She squeezed the open clamshell until its pale faces met and it closed.

      “You were waving, weren’t you?” Julius asked as the dented bow pushed up into the shoreline, plowing over the spidery footprints of a blue heron.  Sengha had seen him a hundred times.  He parked next to the art building on campus, and she would look through the studio window and see him disappearing up a flight of stairs or behind a door.  Sometimes she mistook his shape for a caribou or a large bird moving with easy grace through the trees.  Sengha had seen him, but never heard his voice.  It was as smooth as chocolate drowning in a porcelain cup.

      “Yes,” was all she could offer, her breath halted as she absorbed the moment.

      “Well…” he trailed off, the word fading in the hollow air between them.  His shoulders twisted as he assessed the battered interior of his craft, his forehead pressed with concern.  The entire thing was strewn with wood shavings that curled in the color of pine pollen.  He reached forward and, pulling a cotton sleeve over his hand, used his wrist to wipe the bench facing him.  “Would you like to watch them from out there instead of under all these trees?” he asked and looked up.

      Holding the clamshell as if it were an egg, Sengha stepped in.

      Julius lowered the paddle and shoved off of the blanket of blackened leaves under the water, kicking up a cloud of sediment.  They slithered away from the bank, rocking gently, leaving a wake of onyx ripples.  Sengha watched as he sliced into the water, dipping the paddle on the right and then on the left.  Drops slid from the splintered handle and fell soft as bells onto the lake.

      The boat moved beneath the cavernous respirations of the balloons, and Sengha watched the trees grow dwarfish as they drifted away.  Pulling the lips of her hood under her chin, she noticed an open pocketknife at Julius’ side, the blade grinning in silence on the bench.  She edged back, snatched up by abject vulnerability, every muscle in her body hugging her bones.

      Julius turned and picked up the knife, folded it with tender mastery and tucked it into his coat pocket.  “I was carving.”  He swept some shavings from his shoe out of shame rather than necessity.

      The words came to her as an upturned hand.  When she moved to offer an apology, she saw that his eyes weren’t a soft, liquid brown like hers, but golden, so much so that Sengha was convinced they would seep honey if he cried.  He looked away, reached into his coat and pulled out a piece of pinewood.

      “This kind is easy to shape,” he said and offered her his work.  “I’ve been cutting this one for a couple of days.”  Sengha took the sculpture and lifted it to her face.

      The tight yellow fibers were notched with an intricate labyrinth of ravines almost as fine as hair.  A careful culmination of what was and wasn’t there indicated sinuous feathers in some places and cottony down in others; a lump left for sloping beak, hollow places for the glint off of two piercing eyes.  

      Julius laid the paddle beside its mate at their feet and let the boat drift, brushing the golden dust from his knees.  Sengha ran her forefinger back and forth over the delicate wooden feathers, half-expecting that they would turn airy any second and carry the unfinished creation over the lake, past the trees and into the powdery sky.

      “Wonderful,” she whispered.  He set it upright on the bench next to his hip, the hint of a smile in the right corner of his mouth.  Her heart bubbled up, swollen into doughy foam like milk being scalded.

      “It’s my dad’s old knife.”

      “Does he carve things too?”

      “Not anymore.  He took up the violin and put his whittling stuff away a long time ago after he caught me playing with his knife.  I’d cut myself.  I think it scared him.”

      Laughter skipped across the surface of the lake.  The hot air balloons were close, scattered through the air like petals, and snippets of conversation tumbled down from their baskets.  Two floated close to each other, breathing together like a massive pair of synthetic lungs.  The one closest to the boat, an enormous red honeysuckle hanging in the mist, leaked the quiet murmurings of two people in love.  Sengha didn’t look at Julius but instead lifted her face against the gray air, her lips parted.

      The following second a crack broke the morning like distant gunfire.  The noise rattled over the lake, pin-balling around the boat.  Tense and silent, Sengha and Julius twisted to follow the echo, which seemed to lead them in all the wrong directions.  They sat still, gazing past each other’s shoulders.

      When her eyes caught the flames crawling over the basket of the nearest, lowest balloon, the red one that held the voices of the lovers, all Sengha could do was suck back the air she’d just released and whisper, “Fire.”  

      “It was probably just some hunters…” Julius smoothed his hair away from his eyes, his fingers bumped with scars.

      Sengha shook her head and pointed behind him, muted with panic.  “No!  Fire!  It’s on fire, it’s…”

      The inept hands of the balloonists reached and pulled on the ropes, tugging the globe into a clumsy twirl.  They seemed to hope for a water landing and careened around the toothy tops of spruces and out over the lake.

      Julius turned and observed the scene unflinching.  “They hit a power line.”

      Sengha’s eyes grew glossy with desperate horror as the couple began to raise their voices.  They swung out in a smoky spin over the water, standing to one side of the basket, yelling.  As the balloon began to sink into itself, they climbed to the edge of the basket and crouched there, clinging to the ropes.  “They’re jumping... “

      “They’re too far out.  They won’t make it,” Julius mumbled, watching the fire flicker on the lake.  Faint shouts from other pilots rolled over the treetops, all tinged with helplessness.  “They’ll die from cold.”

      “We’re close!  We can get there…”

      They took up the paddles and began cutting and pulling through the water, Julius on the right side of the boat, Sengha on the left for balance.  They started toward the balloonists, who were gasping in the smoke over the water.

      They had gone more than the distance when the deep pull of Julius’ paddle began to overpower Sengha’s waning strokes, sending them into a spin.  Julius stopped and turned around in time to see two figures leap in silence from the flaming basket.  The smell of burning hair rushed past their cheeks.

      Sengha plunged her paddle into the water, splinters sliding under her skin as the boat rotated in place. “Come on!  I can paddle faster!”

      Julius made no effort to help her.  “We should wait until after everything falls.  This boat isn’t that big.  It could sink.”

      As soon as the splash subsided, the rest of the craft followed its operators into the icy water.  Sengha swallowed air in quiet panic as the crimson nylon folded onto their heads like a seal.

      “Please…”

      Julius didn’t move.  His breaths came like quick fog as he watched the fabric flatten on the surface of the lake, the tongues of flame receding into thick blue steam.  His honeyed eyes never left the red pool on the surface of the lake as he lowered his paddle.        

      “Julius!  Help me!”

      Sengha sobbed, her throat on fire as she tugged harder, whipping the air with wood and water.  But their paddles continued to fall in colliding rhythms, and the metal boat sat far from the motionless folds of nylon, spinning.