Upon my release from hospital, as a kind of test I got into a bathing costume and went out to the rocky promontory a few dozen yards West of my cabin. I often come here in the evening to stand with a drink of wine or whiskey to simply view the little lights of the stars above or the little lights of the city below. It was a craggy escarpment with many small pools of rain water. To cool down I often floated in the largest of these pools; a triangular basin maybe about four feet at the deepest and ten feet across. The wind was buffeting hard as I reached the basin near the cliff edge. I swam about for a moment before rolling a nice head-sized rock from the fringe and, placing this boulder over my chest, sank myself to the bottom. A few of the…show more content… It was not unusual for the promontory to be sat with some view seeker. As I waited for the surface to go to glass, I began to wonder if it were possible that because of whatever damage my lungs long ago sustained, that some secondary oxygen obtaining system had contrapted into being. That some hither to, under utilized organ perhaps my skin, spleen, tonsils or appendix had gone into a ronin trade and was now servicing me in a way not known to science. Yet, before the thought could finish I found that the pool top had calmed and that I was looking up at a mythical view of a man, twenty feet tall standing before an elephant. The colossus had long gray hair darting freely from a cloth pile hat and a huge and haggard heapingness of coat. This was no stranger, but rather my friend from the hospital and local pub, Marrin. As my experiment was all but canceled due to my forgetting the project’s critical tool of proof, I let the rock roll from my chest and as it struck the bottom bellow with a toothsome grind, I floated to the surface.
I felt a little exposed, not least because I was an old, cold and underdressed man in a mountain puddle, but also because I felt sure that Marrin must have seen my chested stone and chore-like drowning.
“Anything?” Marrin said, not missing a