year-old blood leaking from a leg snapped in half when she leaped for water and found it gone, landing on something harder than the paths she'd known through woods, her good legs spinning her crazily toward the center of things. The ramshackle door made a raft of sorts, and he skidded to her side, working a rope for a noose; her sound was that of a child shaken in the night, the eyes stunned open in disbelief, the voice rattling through the windpipe, stopping in time to be garbled by the lips. He told her things she had to know how the rope would seem too tight, how she would bound on home before the morning even spent itself away. The noose settled about the neck and sent a shudder down her back; he moved as shadows move -- his hand ungloved and gliding toward the leg, tangled in rope, to set it free, to let the tug-o-war begin. But she had other plans, her eyes tight on his, a new sound snorting from her throat, her lunge crashing short against the door, giving too much weight for such a mild-wintered lake, and the world gave out beneath them. It was then he knew he cared only for himself, his wife on shore, his children at the window, their grandmother talking his death away from an earlier grief still thundering in her soul, his parents far at home, their phone readying itself to ring-in the news of his drowning; those