Lake Harriet and the Trickey-Dickey Pills - Encore Performance!

 Here, for your reading pleasure, is the most-read piece on this blog, 
published in October of 2013...

David dipped his finger into the pool of clear, cold water that was just taking up space in his living room. The pool had been there for the past week and a half, and David had no idea how it got there.

The pool was six feet and seven inches in length and at its widest point about four feet and two inches in width. David knew this because on the second day of its existence he took out his fancy little tape measure and checked its dimensions. What else would you do with a pool that spontaneously appeared in your living room? He carefully noted the dimensions and wrote them down on a wrapper from a cheesesteak poorboy. He used a black magic marker, for although he originally tried writing with a blue ball point pen, some grease on the wrapper made that impossible.

The depth he had not been able to determine. That is often how it is with spontaneously-appearing living room pools.

David had been checking the dimensions daily, to see if they had changed, and he found no fluctuation in size. Now, after swallowing the oversized silver capsule of the trickey-dickey powder that he loved so much (and ingested twice daily) he was conducting another experiment. He had turned off the heat in his apartment and opened the windows. As it was in the depths of a Minnesota winter, he figured the water in the pool should freeze in no time. This had not yet happened, but the water seemed to be cooling down.

As he looked down into the water it seemed as though there was a face visible just a foot or so below the surface. It did not appear to be attached to a body, and it did not appear to be a severed head, as had been found in that one spontaneously-appearing living room pool that had cropped up in a subdivision in Dayton, Ohio back in 1997. This was just a face, or the form of a face. Perhaps that of a young woman. Or perhaps it was that of a not-as-young woman. It is hard to tell in situations like that.

As he watched the face, he expected to see its eyes open or its lips move, but neither happened. In a minute the face seemed to vanish. Immediately the pool began to shrink in size. Soon it was the size of a coffee table, then the size of a toaster oven, then the size of a napkin holder, then the size of a deck of cards.

David was left looking at a spot of dry carpeting in his very cold living room.

And with a face in his memory forever.