The Boat

by Vlad Levickij

I came here exactly when the stormy and grey water began turning into a calm glassy surface with an orange reflection. The brilliant clean sky filled with heavy clouds with a big circle at the end of the horizon, as if it was punched by someone’s bullet.
The anomalously large solar disk in the centre of it looked exhausted, giving the last rays of life – the day was dying to make way to the night and I could nearly hear a cry of wind and quiet beats of a  ground.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them – a thin line of white fog spread over the lake. Like a snowy sheet it was, for it seemed you can write anything on it with an imagination pen. Only majestic hills leftward were arguing with that airy web, looking out from the water.
Suddenly I saw a little wooden boat chimed in that nature picture – it might had been left here by a fisherman, who lives only on what he catch with his fish-rod. The boat was swinging on a leash in the thick reeds, catching the slightest vibrations of the water. Pure and natural rhythms, that any instrument couldn’t imitate.
I stared on it. Wasn’t it about a human, a person? About a lonely clerk, sitting behind his table in the night, like a prisoner on the chain? How could we land on both feet within the society we are living in? Or did we reach an impasse and there’s nothing to do with it? The waterfall of questions crushed on my head. Could I got an answer even thinking for hours, here, near the lake, face-to-face with the boat? Doubtfully.
I felt sad.
A little trembling pierced my body from head to toe.
The sun was down…