The other side

The lake is swirling. She spreads her weedy reach wide, trailing watery fingers over unsuspecting shore. I cannot stop looking at all the land she's claimed.

Sometimes the lake is paradise. Sometimes far from. I suppose that is the case with anywhere.

I arrive home from a night away to find our puppy, Bear, missing from the farm. He is absent for the first time since he was born in the greenhouse in June.

A few local women are fishing from the lake's edge near our dock. They stand bare-footed in the murky weeds, colourful wrap skirts sodden at the hems. I ask them and they giggle, waving their hands vaguely down the path.  Esteban, one of the farm hands, tells me Bear was violently sick all afternoon.

My heart starts to beat. Hard.


I furiously search the coffee plantations either side of our land, but little Bear appears to have vanished.

At a certain point the next day I give up.

Esteban finds the remains of poison in the field next door. Ironically, it seems the owners meant to target Bear's stray mother, who darts out from the spot looking perfectly, frustratingly healthy, her again-pregnant stomach tauntingly swinging. Full with Bear's brothers.

A couple of days later a fisherman paddling his kayuko in the shallows finds a puppy's swollen body floating in the weeds. Evidence, discarded. I think of the laughing women, who were standing right… there.

I do not look. Nico and Esteban remove it and lay the remains out for the vultures. Within a week there is nothing left but teeth.

I release my grief in a quick burst.

It is stupid -- I know deeper pain than a dead dog -- but I feel dislodged by the poignancy of it all. Somehow floating too, weeds catching in my hair.
For me and my farm family, a rainy summer. For another, a life. In a strange way I feel honoured to have seen one from beginning to end.

I'm not sure what to learn from it other than to remind myself of the edge, so easy to forget when surrounded by beauty. It feels balanced to be presented with the other side, if only for a moment.

To me, his body, swollen and floating in the shallows, is just a speck of an indication of the lake's power. For how many countless villagers lie under her surface?

I am surrounded by the terrible beauty of Atitlan.

She surges over the shore.  Claims her own with ease.

I sit and watch, quietly.