Sitting by the lake, I thought about what that would look like. I tossed a pebble into the still water and watched the splash. I imagined that the drops sent up by the splash, reflecting brightly in the blazing hot summer sun, were burned away by the sunlight, except for a very small, tiny part, which would sprout tiny wings and buzz away on the breeze.
There weren't any swans on the lake. Last week, they attacked a kid, and the kid's father had come back with a shotgun and killed them all. Their long necks had flopped comically around like fighting snakes, or the loops of sprinkler hoses when children trip on them. The city was suing, but nobody seemed to care. It was summer, and the lethargy had set in. Nobody wanted to go outside---it was too hot for even the weathermen to make jokes about it.
I lay back on the dead brown grass and watched the old women on the other side of the lake. They had thrown their crusts of bread into the water even though no swans were around. Maybe they thought that the fish would eat them, or maybe they thought, as I did, that the swans would come back, their bills flecked with blood and water, paddling from just around that corner, smoothly splitting the water with a hundred 'V's, to come back and eat.
I guess the sun was too bright, though, because the crusts just floated there, and got soggy, and eventually disappeared.