It could have been a blue-dragonfly day. That's what Mabel might have told Jim, if he'd been there on that bright, Tuesday mid-August afternoon in the Seeley-Swan valley of Montana. As it was, Mabel was the only person on Clearwater Lake, and she had—months ago—given up the whimsical naming of days in favor of broader, seasonal moods. Life was not a series of moments, but rather a blurred collection of months. That was her latest conclusion, and while she knew it was sour—downright, depressing—she felt entitled to it all the same.

It was the summer of the lonely margaritas. On the rocks. No salt on the rim. Instead, she kept a small green bowl of sea salt next to her glass and dipped in a wetted finger, licking it after each sip. Finger-licking good: this was her inside joke with herself. Mabel was quite sure that if she did not embrace the solitude of that summer, it might break her ribs into shards, and breathing would be too difficult to endure. Her other inside joke: Solitude comes in the piss-gold color of tequila.

Jim wasn't at Clearwater Lake because he was somewhere else.

With his new girlfriend.

That's what Mabel reminded herself when she thought of him, which was often but not obsessively so. Mabel had moved from Illinois to Montana with Jim when he got the job at the ranger district the prior summer. She had tried to be a quick study of living in the West. She went fishing, wore Carhartt dungarees, and learned to grill venison. She named their best days: trout day, first ski day, naked in the aspens day, mule deer day.

It turned out the other woman—Mabel still called her the other woman—did all of these things with more aplomb. Jim left Mabel in May, before their first year in Montana was over.

Mid August now burned hard, and Mabel watched with skepticism as her neighbors deserted town, following some intense desperation to enjoy those bits of summer before the gray slump of winter caged them. Families off camping and touring, deeply tanned children splashing down the rivers. It made her want to stay on her patio all the more, to wait out this period of saving money for the moving truck back to Illinois. The dry hills, which she could see from her apartment window, had eased into a tequila gold. The drier they became, the more they glowed, the more foreign this place felt, and the less hope she had that Jim might change his mind.

But on that particular Tuesday, she was out of sea salt, and she had decided to advertise the sale of her inflatable kayak—the duckie—that had been sitting deflated in the storage room since Jim left. Might as well take it out for one last spin, take a few photos for prospective buyers, she'd thought. The blue skies, her boat floating in the middle of a turquoise lake, the Mission Mountains in the background, a shore lined with huckleberries, not a person in sight—this was an image to quell all desperations.

The grass on the shore smiled occasionally with a flash of iridescent-blue dragonflies. There were hundreds, probably thousands of them. Their bodies winked and tilted in the sunlight. It was a brightness Mabel had not admitted to seeing in recent months, and it seemed to encircle her now as though promising something.

Mabel had brought the fishing rod solely as a photo prop. When they first moved here, when Jim took her to the Blackfoot river for fly fishing lessons, she had decided she liked the sport—the graceful motion, the idea of keeping her body moving, yet standing in the same place. She liked the sound of the water, the browning of her skin, and the sound of a beer can opening. She kept going to the river even after he left her. Fishing was, she kept telling friends back in Illinois, the one good thing he left me. They all teased that they were going to lose her to the Wild West. She let them think this, even though it wasn't true.

On her days off, and sometimes even after her day shift at the grocery store, Mabel put her rod in her Nissan and went to the water. She went to all the spots he'd ever taken her, except the few that required serious hiking. The last time she'd taken out the fishing gear, she'd gone down to his favorite bend on the Blackfoot. She had a good feeling about that particular day and place, but when she arrived, the water ran low, and the rocks were a series of deformed vertebrae bulging from the warm shallows. She never attached the fly to the leader; she didn't cast. Everything, including her blood and the river, felt stationary. Mabel had stood ankle-deep in the river, facing the shoreline, waiting for Jim to show up, knowing that day he would.

He didn't.

She hadn't been fishing since—to the Blackfoot or anywhere else.

Her fingers antsy and the silence overbearing, Mabel reached for the rod in the kayak and cast her line. She felt the weightlessness. Even when she thought of Jim just then, it felt light, a motion repeated for a desired sensation. She let the boat drift closer to shore on the northern tip of the lake, where the water was turquoise and she could see clear through to the white-sand bottom.

Mabel cast again, into a clear spot where the water was free of fish and shadows and hiding spots. She let the line hang limp, unmoving in the still of the afternoon.

Truthfully, she didn't want to catch a fish or set the hook only to pry it out and hold the flopping scales in her hands, to decide whether it would swim free again or succumb to a broken neck. All of it seemed a terrible violence of which she was capable; the possibilities terrified her. What her thin hands might do. Suburban Illinois—the flatness, the cleaned gutted fish flesh in the grocery store, the unswimmable brown river where she'd once lived, the blue pool of her old apartment complex, the predictability of traffic lights—seemed safe, civilized in comparison. She wanted the khaki blur of it all to take her home.

At the edge of the lake, a cloud of dragonflies lifted from the bushes and moved out onto the water. The trees rustled on the rocky shoreline, and then a hump of brown grizzly emerged. The head swung low and wide, sniffed her out. He set one, two, three, then four paws into the water. The snout was large, the shoulders surprisingly bony.

Mabel froze, felt the fragility of the line, the skin of the raft and how easily it gave way under her touch. Her paddle dropped. A dragonfly landed on her knuckle.

They all waited.

The bear—she could smell its dank fur—pushed forward, toward the boat. Jim had showed her—in pictures on the Internet—how to pick out that shoulder hump on a grizzly, how one should avoid, at all costs, the bear with the furious hump. Mabel considered diving in, swimming underwater, sheathed in turquoise as far as her breath might last, losing the beast with her dolphin kick.

The water splashed as the bear took another step, and the distance—now less than 20 yards—became alarming. The fear rose in her veins, spreading, branching, working its way back into her heart, folding it into creased origami. She reached for the loose paddle, swung the boat around, and began to row, her splashes outdoing those of the bear's enormous paws. She looked back often to catch only blurry frames of hide. The grizzly made a slow, lazy turn back towards the huckleberry shore.

Still, Mabel kept pulling on the paddle. She didn't have to look; she could feel the bear at her back, stalking her, and she remembered the smooth canister of bear spray Jim had insisted she carry in places like this. She hadn't seen the spray since the breakup; he must have taken it with him. Bastard.

Her hands grew larger, her back broader. She paddled until her throat burned and her arms wheezed, until the dragonfly, now on her collarbone, swam in perspiration, until she reached the opposite shore, and the knot in her side bloomed open into a cramp of exhaustion.

She turned to scan the place where she'd seen the bear, but the bushes, the blue flashes and the tree trunks all blended together.

The water settled calm.

Had there even been a bear?

Mabel regretted not taking a picture; it might have sealed the deal—a boat and a wild bear. Jim might have seen her more clearly in that frame. Someone might have given her $500 for the duckie. It might have given a new definition to the month of August.

But as her breathing eased into a normal rhythm and the hot stagnant air of high noon settled around her, it looked like any other place she'd ever been. Her fingers uncurled. It was all the same. It would be the same without her. Jim would be the same without her. Her arms felt small once more, and she scanned the lake, the whole oblong oval of it, for some movement of man—a man. All she found were dragonflies. Great hoards of them. She swatted at the wings hovering near her shoulder, then let her head fall back. She looked at the sky—so uniformly blue and pure it seemed treasonous—and waited for the beads of sweat to reach her mouth. Even the salt tasted the same.

Truth

Untruth

We Don't Know and TheyWon't Tell Us

We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us