It was July, and I was ten.

It was hot that day. I mean, it's always hot in Georgia in July, but it was hotter than usual. Wisps of heat rose up from the black asphalt above the beach, and even the sand was too hot to stand on for long. The lake was low, a problem that occurs every summer because of the droughts, but it was muddy, too, which meant that even a swim was no escape from the heat. In order to cool off, you had to go down, deep into the water, and just glide across the clay lake bed, suspended for just a moment in the primordial ooze of our ancestral beginnings.

It was there, on the bottom, that life was revealed to me for the first time. Swimming around a marker buoy, I dove straight down. I clenched my fists into the mud and clay and felt it goosh through my closing fingers. It felt good and cool in my hands, and I remembered Genesis: "God made man from the dust of the earth and said it was good." That's the way I remembered it, anyway. In my ears I heard the high underwater whine of a jet ski passing nearby. I tugged on the rope tied to the buoy, just to pull myself up to the surface.

As my head broke the water, I heard whistles being blown. The lifeguards were admonishing some boys for throwing ice water on some girls- I don't think they meant any harm by it. I took a deep breath- deeper than I'd taken yet, and dove again to glide over the bottom. With my hands stretched out before me like some sonar detector, I felt as if I were flying, just me, alone, through the air. Then I bumped into someone. I immediately came up for air to apologize. No one surfaced with me. I went back under, thinking I might escape unnoticed if he came up after I had dropped back down, like some elusive lake monster.

This time, I swam right between his arms, upraised as if asking for help. I grabbed and pulled- he did not move. I surfaced and yelled for help.

The divers who finally dug him out said he had been dead for a day or so, buried hip-deep in the soft mud and clay of the lake bed. His body was bloated and yellowish-green, his tongue expanded to fill his mouth and protrude through thick, purple lips. A small gun-shot wound, one of the divers said .22 caliber, opened his left temple, but was clean, as if washed.

I vomited then, and all I could think was "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

It was July, and I was ten.