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It's an early dusk at the lake because the sky's marbled with clouds and some of them are dark, heavy, tumescent as skins of flesh ready to burst. It's an early dusk because there's been thunder all afternoon, that laughing-rippling sound at the base of the spine. And heat lightning, quick spasm of nerves, forking in the sky then gone before you can exactly see. Only a few motorboats out on the lake, men fishing, nobody's swimming any longer, this is a day in summer ending early. In my damp puckered two-piece bathing suit I'm leaning in the doorway of the woodframe cottage, #11, straining the spring of the rusted screen door. You don't realize the screen is rusted until you feel the grit on your fingers, and you touch your face, your lips, needing to feel I'm here! Alive and you taste the rust, and the slapping of the waves against the pebbled beach is mixed with it, that taste. Along Wolf's Head Lake in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains the small cottages of memory, crowded together in a grid of scrupulous plotted...