Lost Girls

For Leah

Terrible experience poses the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible.

--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Translated by Walter A. Kaufmann

prologue

An afternoon following a day so perfect that people can speak of nothing but how perfect a day it has been. At least these people, sitting in canvas folding chairs on the small cleared beach of a lake in a country where summer is only a brief intermission of winter, watching the sun begin its setting with reverence and sunburned fatigue, making music with the ice in their drinks and feeling that this--ownership of a good place near water and trees and out of sight of neighbors--is more true and real than anything else they could hope for their lives. One of the men rises to tend to the barbecue and the air is filled with the promise of lighting fluid and burning fat. It is not yet dusk but mosquitoes rise from the unmowed grass and drift up into the willow limbs as bats burst out from under the cottage eaves to swallow them. More drinks, more ice--clinkety-clink --the rising gush and sweep of a woman's laughter at one of the men's mumbled stories. A feathery lick of wind swirls among them, through their legs, cooling the sweat at their necks. Before them the lake flashes with reflected light but steadily darkens just below the surface, turning the afternoon's clear blue to a purple coagulation of silt and water and weeds--the color of frostbitten lips, of blood left to dry on the blade.