By TIMOTHY WATT
Long ago I found myself in a dark wood wandering, a tale-teller with no tale to tell. How I’d come to be in that place, I don’t know. I was there shivering, empty, trying and failing to remember the tales I’d told, in times past, in ages before. I couldn’t remember any of them, much as I tried to conjure characters in the throes of a verb, scenes in rooms, conversations, anecdotes, themes. And soon after—I don’t know when, time like the night was monochrome and either too rapid in its passing to be tracked at all, or statuesque, cold and still—I found I no longer knew what a tale itself was, its contours and constituent parts, its reasons, its design. It was then I heard a slow crashing in the timber behind me. I did not look up. There was nothing consoling to be seen. Before me stretched a vast lake, a lake whose color rendered all previous understandings of black, blue, a lake of terrifying calm. The surface was glass, unrippled and hulkingly silent, and the lake did not lap against any of its shores. It was—I see it now—a body of water in an attitude of petrifaction.