A fun writing exercise, from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction:

Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed a murder. Do not mention the murder.

UPDATE: The people at Sheila O'Malley's are playing, too.

The sun reflecting in the water hurts my eyes. It's like little stabbing asterisks. She loved this place. I guess I used to. You'd think the water was warm. It looks warm, but it's not. Way down at the other end of the lake, there's a good place to picnic or fish.

He watched from the footbridge: the concentric waves spread wider on the darkening water. He watched a little longer, making sure.
Then left.

It was anything but what it was - a glinting in the brush, a will-o-the-wisp swarm fleeing in the middle distance, the brilliant sunset sky reflected, inverted, turned upside down - until he was leg-deep in it. Then - cold, too cold, freezing about his mis-placed, soaked calf, mud already oozing around his shoe and sock. The thorny brush bit into his grasping right hand, shocking him into himself. An open lakeside, hidden until this very moment, swept away on every side - exposing him to the hypothetical view of bored passengers and distracted drivers in the rushing interstate traffic on the opposite shore. But the setting sun was in their eyes, and his surprise, no more notable than any of the thousand animal dramas hidden by this lakeside brush from, and the onrushing run of humanity was divided from him by the darkening and watery deep.

All he could see was the bright blue sky and the thick, cotton clouds below him, and for one brief moment he forgot what he had done and felt as if he was rocketing upwards into this beautiful sky.

Damn my too-quick urge to hit the "post" button. Without the extraneous "from",

It was anything but what it was - a glinting in the brush, a will-o-the-wisp swarm fleeing in the middle distance, the brilliant sunset sky reflected, inverted, turned upside down - until he was leg-deep in it. Then - cold, too cold, freezing about his mis-placed, soaked calf, mud already oozing around his shoe and sock. The thorny brush bit into his grasping right hand, shocking him into himself. An open lakeside, hidden until this very moment, swept away on every side - exposing him to the hypothetical view of bored passengers and distracted drivers in the rushing interstate traffic on the opposite shore. But the setting sun was in their eyes, and his surprise, no more notable than any of the thousand animal dramas hidden by this lakeside brush, and the onrushing run of humanity was divided from him by the darkening and watery deep.

He stood by the lake. Quiet air, quiet dark water. And that afternoon, for the first time in months, there was quiet inside his head, too.

He waited long enough that the echos died. First the sounds of the splash faded into the trees that surrounded the lake. Then the ripples smoothed on the water.

And then, after a longer while, life returned to the lake. The first hesitant bird's song, minnow's rings, a turtle surfacing for air, a water snake looking for ... something.

Some life returned, but not all.

The lake was still, a featureless slab of tungsten beneath the wild iron beauty of the predawn March sky. Postman ignored the raw cold and watched, as a good hunter ought: not moving at all, eyes, ears, and nose at full stretch. Fists in coat pockets, he hung back a few feet into a stand of still-bare birches and scanned the ground. He might have been a statue clad in a pea coat and watch cap; he might have been a deeper shadow among the shadows.

In a moment he heard it -- the muffled crunch-crunch-crunch of footsteps in gravel. Still unmoving, he tried to hold even more still as the steady rhythm grew louder.

A figure -- apparently an early-morning jogger -- hove into view, pounding machine-like along the gravel. Postman's eyes narrowed. Had the jogger looked into the birches? If he had, he gave no sign as his figure and the sound of his shoes on the gravel path receded into the distance, and finally into inaudible invisibility.

Still the lake lay umoving. Postman fingered the weight in his pocket. He could be out of the trees and into the clearing in a few seconds. A few seconds more to cross the path, taking extra time to reduce the noise of his passing. In all, he could be at water's edge in less than half a minute.

As if, he thought with an inward smirk. They always drag the lake.

(The lake referred to is Lake Maggorie in northern Italy.)

The lake looks cold, the color of mud. The villas are vacant, their pull-down shutters lowered like eye lids, secured with round locks, like coins on the eyes of the soon to be stiff.

It was a loud silence. The bared trees, their leaves now but a cushion upon the ground, echoing the death of summer's green. And the lake, a mirror of bland grey and drab browns, immoble and cold. Death is a quiet thing, he thought. Calm. A basin with nary a ripple. He stared out over the body of water before him, the same broth teeming with youth and vigor during the summer, and saw death not as the reality around him but as its mere reflection upon water. The more one disturbs the surface, the more the truth quivers.

He stepped dwon to the lake's edge, kneeled, and eased his hands into death itself. The blood came off easily. "Water," he remembered an old college professor saying. "The universal solvent."

"Well, that's done," he thought. "I won't have to come here again."

The cicadas once again began their metallic whine, rising and falling, the tune of late summer.

A heron split the sky, its neck arched in flight.

There was no sound save for the cicadas and the occasional grunt of a frog.

A few leaves drifted down and settled on the water's surface. It had been a dry summer and promised to be a dry fall.

He stood on the small footbridge, gazing dreamily across the lake. The summer picnickers had left when school started, the retired women with their easels and watercolors had packed up and gone back to volunteering in the hospital or the library or whatever they did, the courting couples had gone back to college. No people. Just as he liked it - unsullied by people with their banal desires, their stupid small-talk.

A cool breeze - a sign of things to come - ruffled the surface of the lake. A few small ripples lapped at the shore and the supports for the footbridge. Then the lake was still again, its glassy surface unbroken.

The goldenrod and gaura growing along the north shore had a blasted look; they were not flowering as brightly this year. It had been a dry summer and promised to be a dry fall.

But that would not be a problem. The lake was spring-fed, always full and cold, clear in some places, shadowed and dim in others.

He had chosen well. He had always liked the dim places, all his life. He liked the places away from people, away from their weakness, their need, their misunderstanding.

He looked again into the dimmest of the dim places, nodded to himself, and set off for home. He would make himself a cup of tea and have some sardines on toast, and then sit and listen to the radio to see if there was any news...

"The lake was big and wet."

(What? Can't murderers be laconic?)

Look, I'm tellin' ya. I was there. You don't have to be a native Minnesotan to know that lakes just don't sit that still. All the life in there just has to express itself sometime.

But this one didn't. I'm tellin ya, it didn't. Not a single fish jumpin' after a bug. Not a single leaf floatin' down to the dam overflow at the south end. I watched for a [censored] hour, and I'm tellin' ya, the lake didn't move.

And it told me what I had to do. It's the consistency of the universe at stake. Life didn't belong, doncha know?

Well? Doncha?

There was a line where the stillness of the water glimmered and hazed into the mist - not a line, but the suggestion of one. With the sun hidden, the lake and sky were reflections of each other, one up, one down.

One down.

His hands, jammed tight in his pockets, felt sticky and bruised. He wanted to cut them off, but once the left was gone, there was no feasible way to remove the right. It took him a moment to think that through. A moment in which the low gray clouds shifted, and an angry ray of sunlight cajoled the water into life.

Angry? Cajoled?

Yeah. That's kind of embarrassing. I noticed it as soon as I pressed post.

Looking at the glassy surface he remembered his boyhood and the fish that would swim after his hooks while sharing secrets with long gone friends. A far off siren jerked him back to the present. Now he could only see a beast returning his gaze from the lake. The beast was weeping as it turned the gun around to fire one last time.

As quietly as possible he broke the surface, rolled on to his back and gasped deeply, repeatedly filling his lungs to capacity.

In order to calm himself.

In order to think over his next moves.

While the dive had become more complicated and far longer than he had expected - too close by far even for his experienced comfort - the surface was still warm enough to afford him time to recover his composure.

Time to observe the familiar shore from a slightly different perspective and to select a landing point.

As he rolled over to stroke slowly to shore his thoughts turned to Teddy, and the sobering task that lay ahead.

Still waters have a calming effect much like watching snowfall.

His run slowed to a trot. His lungs demanded air. His eyes, wet with tears saw a halo around the evening sun as it bounced off of the lake, turning everything a bright, glowing orange. He hadn't truly noticed it until he escaped the woods.

Gasping, he clumsily ran into a tree, leaning for support. He didn't care how long he had been running. He needed to breathe. He was in no shape to run as much as he had. He slid to the foot of the tree, ruining his shirt, whimpering like an injured child.

As he sat there, slumped and wheezing, he became lost in the calm reflection of the sky on the water. The sunlight dancing in the ripples...the autumn leaves sailing across the lake...he had finally stopped crying.

The water of the lake was like slow moving sheets of glass. Dark, quietly licking at the edge, it was the simplest noise in the world. He almost smiled at it, remembering a time when he was younger, stomping in puddles with his father holding his hand.

He remembered his Father.

Suddenly, he realized the tears on his face were cold. He looked at his hands. They had blood on them. Suddenly, the evening sun provided no warmth. He could hear a siren in the distance.

Exhaustively, he hauled himself to his tired feet, and tried to run as hard and fast as he just had.

It appears some are dangerously close to treading on the hallowed ground that is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

It hurt to look at the sky, so clear and bright. The lake was worse; its still surface covered a thousand possibilities. More than a thousand. More than he could count. How could something be one way and be another way at the same time. It was always like that, he thought, like this lake, pretty on the surface and underneathÖstuff you canít see, like slippery rocks and fish. He remembered fishing. He always threw them back but his hands would stink for days. He was thirsty. He cupped his hands and filled them with the clear, bright water. All he could taste was fish.

What an interesting thread.

I presume my perspective comes from having been a technical writer, not a creative writer.

But to my mind, none of these follow the instructions -- "describe" the lake.

Very eye-opening lesson on perspective!

looking down
seeing dribble from my lip
stretch like a rubber band
snaps and hits the water
distorting the face looking back at me
if i shut my eyes
will the water be still
i think not

The lake's surface was still, its shore quiet. The rising sun cast a straight line of blinding glare from one end of the horizon to the dock on which he stood. Perfect for waterskiiing.

Stopping By The Tell-Tale Heart on a Snowy Evening

The lake is lovely, dark and deep.
A perfect place for eternal sleep.
Well, what would I want to give him that for?
I'll bury the body under the floor.