Deep below the lake’s murky surface, there sits—in tact—a house. A two-story structure of Carpenter Gothic details like elaborate wooden trim bloated to bursting. Its front yard: purple loosestrife. Its inhabitants: alligator gar, bull trout, and pupfish. All glide past languidly—out of window sashes and back inside door frames. It is serene, and it is foreboding. Curtains of algae float gossamer to and fro. Pictures rest clustered atop credenzas. A chandelier is lit, intermittently, by freshwater electric eels. And near a Victrola, white to the bone, a man and a woman dance in a floating embrace.
Keith Hoerner lives, teaches and pushes words around—aside the rolling hills of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. His work can be found in lit journals like decomP, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, and Litro. His recently published memoir, The Day the Sky Broke Open, can be found on Amazon.
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