Drowning

an Art of Dying fragment

Possibly, I should not be here.

The year was 1961. The month was February. The winter was cold.

At the far end of a long, narrow field a small river ran into several acres of marshland — a small, shallow lake in the spring, mostly bog in the summer and fall until the rains and the swollen autumn river re-laked it by the end of October. By February it was all a frozen…