One-Sentence Story: No, Not Really

Egret Scroll by Hishida Shunso

The snow white egrets were standing near the shore by the old boat house up to their knees in a wake of refuse—fast food wrappers, aluminum cans, plastic shopping bags—and the pelican was plunging after fish into cool green water whose surface was marred by the sickly shimmer of oil, so as she walked quickly down the asphalt path around Oakland's Lake Merritt the woman in black leggings and a green, oversized corporate tee-shirt said apologetically, “I used to think all the garbage in this lake was there because people sitting on the grass eating their lunches would throw their trash right into the lake, but then I found out that the city’s storm drains empty directly into the lake, so I realized that it was people throwing their trash into the gutters on the city streets—or maybe even just the trash accidentally blowing out of overfilled garbage cans into the streets—that was polluting the lake” (but what she did not say to her new companion was that one of their coworkers had once found a dead body floating in the lake while he was jogging around it, and that a woman at her gym had told her that she knew someone who had been raped—dragged into that tunnel over there just across from the Henry J. Kaiser auditorium—while running down this same path, and that this was why the woman in the black leggings had promised herself that she would never walk the lake alone), and the woman walking with her, the woman in purple leggings and the same green, oversized corporate tee-shirt as the first woman, replied, “I really love this lake because it reminds me of the lakes in Bucharest where I grew up,”—“...though they were cleaner, of course,” put in the first woman,”—“no, not really,” said the second woman.

by Nina Zolotow

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