HM Steps Up to the Plate with a Short Story/Description of A Lake Called "The Tear in the Canonazo"

This is HM. He lives in Los Angeles and writes screenplays in his spare time. Last month he was the first entrant in the inaugural Literary Smackdown. This month is no different as Heath needed just 6 days to come up with his Smackdown offering. So, without further ado, I give you the literary stylings of HM, and his attempt to describe, as dictated by John Gardner's Art of Fiction's end-of-book exercise, "a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder, without mentioning the murder." Brush off those 1-10 scales and prepare to judge, and judge justly. DING DING DING! Commence the Smackdown!

The Tear in the Canonazo
By HM

Tender was his nickname to the boys at The Hotel Cohiba, which wasn’t a hotel at all, but a tumbledown bar feebly disguised as a prestigious cigar lounge to elude indoor smoking laws and some of the more stringent sin-taxes. Tender didn’t mind his nickname so much, at least not so much in the recent years, but when the boys at ‘Cohiba’ started calling him that, he wanted to show them who was tender and who wasn’t.

Tender had a soft ankle. The bone was pliable, mainly around the joint, from a bad spell of gout three years back that nearly took his entire foot. On most days he had a terrible time walking without the aid of a cane.

But today, he was having a fairly better day than most. The medication was doing a fine job of stiffening the weak sinew around his ankle; enough so for him to make a single rotation about the lake beneath the hill at ‘Cohiba’ before the dull throb set in. Tender briskly rubbed his hands along each arm, trying to warm himself. The evening air was getting nippy, cutting through his daytime clothing and chilling him to the bone.

The water danced like someone he thought of only briefly. The setting sun turned the water crimson, and he had no choice but to think of that someone just a little bit longer. At some points, the waters rolled just right turning purple and even black, creating large circles of darkness. The shaded, peaty edges of the lake seemed muddy at times as the ducks hid their beaks into their feathers, readying for a cold night. Greenish-yellow specks twinkled above their heads, welcoming the coming hours. The crickets sang a cadenced lullaby to all who would listen.

All but a swan, elegant and poised, with the privileged intention of slicing through the wafting crimson to the deepest part of the lake: the very center. Tender’s attention followed the swan, casting his glances back and to small, round, shiny, black duck eyes, glistening by the marsh, following her as she passed with a quiet faintness too sweet for the ducks, too sweet for Tender, and his rosy lips bended around his teeth amassing great folds around his neck and brow. That large bulbous beak, cinder in color, draining into those large black patches around the eyes, and eventually melting into the white, fluffy flounce surrounding them. The crimson danced in their black, shiny duck eyes; ever staring, ever watching, like the boys at ‘Cohiba’.

He imagined the purple and black circles in the water widening until there was no water left, consuming nature’s perfect adornment.

He imagined the fish floating up from the hole, their round, swollen eyes too worried to notice the swan as she deteriorated, her feathers wilting like petals in the cold evening air, and sank deeper into the wet chasm, the fluffy down soaked in the crimson waters. He imagined the wake smacking the marsh and the ducks, urging them absent.

Then he stopped imagining. The swan was gone.

He pulled a Cuban stogie from his pocket. A Canonazo. Brown, triple-fermented tobacco flowered out from a tear in the bronzed leaf wrapping. The tip was dented and limp. He mashed the leaf with his cold, numb fingers, trying to correct the tear and straighten the bend, but the cigar had already been smashed.