Water Like A Stone

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Mist rose in swirls from the still surface of the canal. It seemed to take on a life of its own, an amorphous creature bred from the dusk.

The day, which had been unseasonably warm and bright for late November, had quickly chilled with the setting of the sun, and Annie Lebow shivered, pulling the old cardigan she wore a bit closer to her thin body.

She stood in the stern of her narrowboat, the Lost Horizon, gazing at the bare trees lining the curve of the Cut, breathing in the dank, fresh scent that was peculiar to water with the coming of evening. The smell brought, as it always did, an aching for something she couldn’t articulate, and an ever-deepening melancholia. Behind her, the lamps in the boat’s cabin glowed welcomingly, but for her they signaled only the attendant terrors of the coming night. The fact that her isolation was self- imposed made it no easier to bear.

Five years ago, Annie had left behind her husband of twenty years as well as her job with South Cheshire Social Services, and had bought the Horizon with money accumulated from her interest in her family’s shipping business. She’d imagined that the simplicity of life on a boat sixty feet long by a mere seven feet wide, and the physical s

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