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hey fished the lake dry, pulling up every fat carp and dull, gray croaker, leaving only a colony of frogs to endlessly breed and bloat themselves on mosquito larvae. We’ll all sit at the table near the window, watching thousands of men drag their boats out into the middle of the water, only to drag them back full of nothing but crumpled beer cans and water bottles filled with tobacco spit. This bar is loud with angry chatter and the quiet drone of sweat bees hovering around our heads. At the back, we are a woman who is rocking, crossed legged, shifting the wooden legs of her stool in a slow rhythm. Someday, we’ll all have a baby and that baby will buy this place. He’ll fill the lake with snails and the snails will grow as big as house cats. People will fly in from all over the world, just to see them, so many people that they’ll build a new airport across town. They’ll name it after some dead general in some long-forgotten war. It’s hard to see it now, but the snails will taste like catfish and their eyes will look a little too much like ours. We’ll eat them until there are no more snails to eat, then we’ll move across the country to search for more snails. We’ll build a new bar, next to a new lake. We’ll name the lake after that same general, but we’ll forget who he was. The snails will be bigger and their eyes will blink less often.
