Work Text:
There was a soft whistling between the reeds, the soft summer breeze playing with the swaying stalks. Gerry closed his eyes, and simply allowed himself to listen. The wind between the reeds, little ways crashing gently against the rock he was sitting on, dragonflies buzzing past him to fly across the lake…
He opened his eyes again, and looked down into the murky water. It was green with duckweed, almost too much to see the pebbles beneath. There were shapes drifting beneath, fish or algae, impossible to tell. Gerry leaned forward and squinted.
The dark shapes beneath the water distorted his reflection, made it into something it was not. Gerry grabbed his almost-forgotten pencil from his lap, remembered its function just in time, and exchanged it for a pebble before he threw it into the water. The surface rippled and distorted, and the duckweed reluctantly made room for Gerry to peer beneath the water.
From the lake, his image stared back. There were a few stray leaves of duckweed floating across his reflection, speckling his hands and knees with dark spots. The yellow remnants of a dying alga intermingled with the image of his hair, giving it a washed out, shoddy look. Just when Gerry was about to lean further forward to take a closer look, a small fish broke the surface to catch a swimming larva, just at the center of his image’s forehead.
He sank back onto his rock, and sighed. Over the gravel of the bank, he heard the quick steps of GeGe approach. She came to stand just behind him. Her reflection looked over the shoulder of his, but the duckweed was already drifting back across it, reducing first Gerry’s and then GeGe’s images to nothing but green swirls.