So near, you could touch it: Hylas leans out over the quiet water and stares down into the depths, to where the light fades to blue, then to black. A rock falls from his hand and disappears into the darkness. He bends his lips to drink, and it recedes from him, daggers his hand toward the depths and touches only soft grass. He has thrown himself into these ponds a dozen times or more, and found nothing there but the muted thump of the soft forest floor.

He does not want for food, nor for drink, not physically, anyway, but his cells remember and he yearns. A second on the lips, the needle’s quicksliver dip into the meat of his shoulder, the flesh between his toes; the world spins around and he is lying in the grass, staring up at the sunlight filtering through the branches. He has been here longer than he can remember, but the light does not change, the shadows do not shift, he is neither hot nor cold. He scrubs his hands against the earth and breathes deep, comforts himself with the continued if invisible life of microorganisms.

He hears birds off among the trees, but cannot see them, cannot find them. He has wandered for hours at times and only ever found more shaggy-barked trees, more shallow pools, the occasional sleeping body. He lies down next to them, so near they could touch, if the distance could be crossed, the boundary passed, the old world made new again.

Hylas has been doing the webcam grind for nearly a year now and he’s just barely breaking even. “It hurts… hurts to be… shot. Maybe if I’d known that, I’da shot… shot less people.” The ceiling was off-white. He wasn’t anyone’s prize. “Five hundred days, I said. Do the third row before the second tomorrow, that’s all.” His voice was thick and crumbly, strained.

“Who’s next?” says Karen as the last guy works his way back toward his friends, his lips a little purple with bruising.

“Ah, geez,” he says, and bends over the desk, already hard. Light from the city below travels up his body and over his face as the blinds rotate up leaving a thin oily film that he would feel as he crawled into his cold bed tonight with another half bottle of scotch inside him. First went the tall buildings, the new buildings, then the old, the sturdy buildings, graceless squat buildings, last the shacks and the shantys and the tents and the hoovervilles.

Xiksthan leans forward, kisses him over the many-legged remains of their meal. The kid went to the door with them and he was left alone with the couple. She laughed raggedly. They didn’t know Ed. Lightning flashed and the lights went out and Murphy screamed, high and shrill.

An inch of water in a pool closed for the season, and a young man face down in it, wrists tied together behind his back with duct tape. They found him when the snow melted in the spring, seven months after he’d disappeared, after the whole county had turned out to search for him, after his name and photo had spread for a thousand miles in any direction, after fourteen press conferences by the police. The snow melted, and the country club opened, and when they pulled the cover back there he was, preserved by the cold for the most part.

A suicide, the cops said, and refused to answer questions.

Years later, and miles away across the state, another young man face down in a river. Disappeared in the winter, disappeared from an empty car, leaving behind a laptop, a phone, a change of clothes. No search parties, no news coverage, no updates; a father making the rounds from precinct to silent precinct and church to church, pleading. A handful of mourners wandering the banks, calling his name, hours past sunset. The river never froze, but there he was in the spring, newly dead.

Suicide, said the cops, and closed the file.

A beautiful boy, drowned in a pool.

That’s the story, anyway: mouth green with cress he drowned, a sailor boy dead in fresh water. His great-thewed lover turned the island out for a month of searching, dawn to dusk, and then left; even love only lasts so long.

The island remembers.

Spring is ending and they run the hills, the trails, the dirt paths, crying a dead name in honor of a dead love. Forced, they say; by tradition if nothing else. Oh, well. In the evening they eat cress, drink new wine.

White driftwood on rocky beaches.

A fisher, caught in his nets, frozen in place; helpful hands descending. That’s the story, anyway. Slipped off the docks, a bad fall stopped just short of the water, arms and legs above the tide line, dark with the sun.

Train tracks.

They drink too much, joylessly, stubbornly, in cars parked outside of town. Plausible deniability, a stupid accident walking home, some high school nonsense. Red rocks and iron and parents who are careful to not search their rooms.

Woodsmoke and gulls.

You circle back to these stories, to these moments, like sea birds over a school of fish. Each time, one spiral higher, one circle wider, and then—

He holds his breath and dives deep. Deep, and deeper yet; the bottom is meters away, and the light is fading. His lungs claw at his throat, bang heavy against his lips, bubble deep in his brain, but deeper yet.

He reaches bottom, settles uneasily in the murk, and winds weeds around his traitor limbs to quell their insurgent buoyancy. His lungs are in revolt, rioting in the streets; he tears up the cobblestones for barricades, lights fires in all the churches and libraries: there will be nothing left but ash for the revolutionaries.

Deeper still, and the light has gone — he watches stars wheel across the darkness in stubborn pain — and she is there.

“Hylas,” she says, her voice the voice of a woman he knew in childhood. “Where have you been?” He takes breath to reply to her, and settles to the bottom of the pool, unquestioned king at last.