The Dark Lake Read Online Free PDF

clear-plastic frames off when she was serious. I wondered if the glass in them was really prescription or just a prop for these occasions. They hung by a beautiful, silver chain around her neck, over a lovely, caramel-colored, silk blouse.
    "What do you mean why?"
    "I mean, you were frightened by the picture, seems like a more frightening thing to do to drive to a park in the middle of the night and walk around a lighthouse at midnight alone?"
    "It's not a park. It was the carp ponds."
    I stared at the serene pieces of art on the wall, the ones in all offices of pastel colors. Who could get upset looking at these?
    There was one piece of art in there that I thought truly represented Miriam. It was a very small mask that must have come from someplace like Sumatra.
    Krishna had a lot of things like that in her room. Small , jeweled elephants, dark masks, little decorated boxes and knickknacks that came from far-flung corners of the world. Indonesia. The Philippines. Japan.
    On her coffee table she had lots of interesting pieces of art that she had made: a ceramic ashtray in the shape of lips, a white , ceramic mold she had made of her boyfriend Ames’s arm. It held a red candle, and when she burned it, it looked like the arm was dripping blood. She used to giggle about that. She had designed it that way. She had made a mold of his arm and put that red candle in it so she could light it and watch blood drip down his arm and giggle about it. When she broke up with him, she didn’t even bother telling him she had. She just said, when he showed up somewhere, “What are you still doing here? We’re not dating anymore.”
    Boxes and boxes : tiny, jeweled ones, larger ones painted in bold, beautiful colors, ones laden with ivory carvings. Not cluttered looking even for the fact that they seemed to be everywhere I looked.
    "Here," she would say, her eyes sparkling with mischievous glee, " you can have this one. It's perfect for containing weed."
    And she would hand me an embroidered red and silver and gold silk case with gold snaps.
    I'd ceased to question why I should be so enchanted with this idea. It was part of being with Krishna : receiving odd little gifts from around the world to contain my dope in.
    They were the exotic counterpart to the cedar chest belonging to my grandmother, or the cigar box from the nineteen twenties from my grandfather. I accepted them with the delight she expected to see, then loaded up her little , red, wooden pipe and passed it around. Once I had brought a dragon-shaped bong, but we just sat and looked at it while passing the pipe. It was far too fancy for use. We'd yet to take a single toke off it.
    One time we lost her red , wooden pipe. It was nowhere to be found. We were stuck using the dragon beast and out of matches. Fortunately Krishna was always lighting incense and candles everywhere, so even though we'd run out of matches, we still had fire.
    "They once asked Keith Richards what's the worst thing imaginable ; he said not having a match,” Krishna observed as she looked in every single drawer more than once.
    "Shit,” she said finally . "I'm too stoned to go downstairs.” And she sat down, exhausted from the search. It was, after all, 2:00 a.m.
    Meanwhile, Gay was holding that giant, white arm that drips candle-wax blood at an angle, trying to light the dragon bong, trying to get a toke off it, but the red wax keeps dripping into the bowl, causing the weed to smolder much longer than normal, and hurting her lungs. She coughs and complains. Krishna sits giggling at the sight of it.
    After a while I notice the lighter sitting on Krishna's glitter - and candle-laden coffee table.
    I grab the lighter and light a cigarette while watching Gay's struggle with my dragon bong, and toss it casually back on the table.
    It takes Gay a few moments to recognize the humor in it. She looks over at my cigarette embers glowing in the dimness of the candle -lit room. She glances over at Krishna, who has