Short-story

She gazes upon the dark green waters of the lake, dense, unmoving, perfectly still. Its surface is scattered with clusters of Hydrocharis: broad, round leaves gathered into strange, floating tapestries from which delicate white blossoms emerge now and then. Along the edges, Water Plantains with their emerald, lance-shaped leaves cling to the muddy banks, alongside thick stalks of reeds standing as motionless as the rest. The muted sky casts violet undertones across the great basin, whose boundaries lie close, visible, yet somehow unreachable.
It’s late afternoon, the tail end of September. The world around is preparing for its long, dormant slumber, a retreat from which water plants remain exempt. They will continue to draw their sustenance from the silty, sluggish liquid teeming with life, against all odds. They’ll drift gently on faint, turbid ripples and even if battered by wind and rain, will merely slide a few feet this way or that, then settle again in their quiet suspension.
The lake is exactly as she left it, years ago. Jade closes the door of her Alfa Romeo Montreal, an emerald green convertible her father bought in 1972 that she recently restored. Beneath the hood, a 200-horsepower engine growls, the kind she saves for the wide, straight autobahns of Germany, when she visits her sister in Freiburg. There are no speed limits, though few drive as fast as she does.
She sits on a wooden bench facing the water and lights a cigarette. The air still carries a trace of warmth, though the sun is dulled by clouds. The lake’s silty floor smells of wet sand and the slow decay of roots. Her phone vibrates in the pocket of her raincoat. Jade reaches for it and sees a name shimmer on the electric blue screen: Klein.
With a tap, the screen fades from vivid blue to black. She stands up, then throws the phone far out into the water. For a moment, it disturbs the stillness, sending out a ripple of concentric rings. Then the lake returns to perfect calm.
From the other pocket, she pulls out a small notebook, still wrapped in plastic. She tears it open and studies the stiff cardboard cover, patterned with a strange, colorful animal print. She opens it to clean white pages, lined with faint horizontal rules. Then closes it again. She lights another cigarette. And remembers the old pen in her car, one of those company giveaways from long ago. It’s green, with the words Klein Steelworks printed in a painfully bold blue.
As a child, she loved wandering through the immense hangars just beyond the city limits, where she learned the entire journey of steel: from the roaring blast furnace pouring molten iron, to slabs, blooms, billets, rails, beams, and sheets. The workers all wore blue overalls stamped with the steelworks’ logo across their backs. None of them had ever looked happy.
She lingered in that inert world for a long time, unchanged and unchanging, just like the lake before her. Not long ago, she loved swimming in its waters, pushing through the floating plants that clung to her skin. Something about that stagnant landscape soothed her, held her thoughts at bay, helped her keep a fragile balance.
Jade starts the engine. She backs slowly onto the unpaved road, then shifts into first.
The tires screech and the Alfa’s V8 surges forward with a deep, joyful growl.
On the leather seat beside her lies the little notebook with its animal print cover and the plastic pen from Klein Steelworks. On the first page, in hurried handwriting, Jade has written a single date: March 13, 1978. The day she was born. The beginning of her desire to tell her story.