Work Text:
The Waiting Pond
by Susan Rand
The boy went to the pond in the evening, to fish.
The pond lay back in the woods behind the Home where he lived. It looked dead, a flat expanse of grey-green water surrounded by trees and a stiff fringe of weeds.
Yet the boy felt sure it harbored fish, and he meant to have some out, and take them back to the Home and get the cook to fry them for his dinner.
He carried a fishing pole and a little brown paper bag to bring the fish home in. He put the pole down on the ground and went over to peer into the water, hoping to catch a glimpse of the desired prey. But the pond presented only a blank face. The trees grouped around its edge
murmured in sleepy, sympathetic voices, as though to remind him that it was, actually, very close to bedtime.
The boy sat down on a crumbling, mossy old log to bait his hook. From his pocket he took a transparent plastic bag with a worm in it. Wincing a little - he didn't much like this part - he took the worm out, closed his eyes and stabbed it firmly through its middle.
The worm writhed in his fingers, trying to twist away from the blunt point of the hook. A messy, distasteful chore, but essential, and finally he managed it.
"All right, fishes," he said, his voice sounding loud in the stillness, "here I come, to catch you."
He walked to the pond's edg and threw the hook out, as he'd once seen his father do, long ago. The hook, weighted with a lead sinker, soared out and fell into the water with a faint plopping sound, and sank, and vanished.
The boy stood with the pole in his hands, unsure what to do next. How long were you supposed to wait? He hadn't any idea. He waited a little longer, until he felt a tug on the line, a gentle pull. All right! He wound the reel up. The hook climbed slowly out of the water - "err-err- err" said the reel as it came.
The trees held their breath and stared. What was that? It wasn't a fish, couldn't be. No fish ever grew so long and thin as that. A dripping strip of grey-white something, rising at the end of his pole, glistening in the oncoming dusk, looking like nothing he'd ever seen before. He brought it all the way out, backing slowly away from the water until he'd dragged it up on the bank. He put his pole down and went forward to look at it.
The thing, whatever it was, lay in the dirt, thin and straight in parts, lumpy elsewhere. He touched it; it felt rubbery, like the membrane that encloses a boiled egg. There were wrinkles in it. He touched it again, and under his curious fingers it spread itself out on the ground into the shape of a man.
If a person could take their shadow off, he thought, and throw it in the pond, it might come out looking exactly like this.
He spread it out carefully, first the arms and legs, then the torso and head, and saw it had features: a rather large nose, a high forehead, two small flaps of ears. But where the eyes and
mouth should have been were only tattered holes.
"Who are you?" he asked. "How did you get in the pond?"
The trees murmured and whispered, leaning a little forward like spectators at the scene of an auto accident. On the ground the shape lay stretched over rotting leaves and twigs, caught here and there on the twigs. To the boy it looked very like the dried tracks left by dying slugs passing by night through the garden.
He'd never heard of anyone throwing a dead body in a pond. They put dead people in boxes, and buried them in the ground, heknew that, that's what they'd done to his grandfather.
He'd seen it, he was there.
"Are you a soul?" he asked.
The shape did not answer.
He squatted there for a time in silence, then carefully detached the hook and again approached the pond. The worm had gone, but he didn't think he'd need it.
Out went the line over the water, down dropped the sinker and hook, "plop." The trees held their
breath. Again came the tug, and slowly he drew it out - a woman, this time. He brought her forth and arranged her next to the man, spread out her long dripping hair and her legs and arms,
and after looking at her a while he placed her hand in the man's hand.
Somebody and his wife, then. A mother and a father, perhaps.
Again he fished, and quickly brought forth two membraneous children, a boy about his age, and a girl. Once laid out together, they took up most of the available space. An entire family, in the pond. What could it mean? How had they got there? Had they fallen in, and drowned? If these were their souls, where were their bodies?
Their eyeholes stared up at him, their mouths gaped, like speechless singers all trying for the same note.
"What do you want to do?" the boy asked, moving his hands helplessly.
No answer.
And now it was getting dark, almost too dark to see. Moving quickly but cautiously he gathered them up, gently unhooked them from the twigs and folded them into a flat, moist packet, with the children in the middle and the parents wrapped carefully, protectively around them. The packet he placed for safe-keeping in the crotch of a nearby tree.
"Take care of them," he instructed. "I'll be back."
In the morning he returned, as promised. Just outside the wood the sun shone with the face of a newly-washed baby, but around the pond it seemed to him that the trees had gathered themselves even more closely together, trapping last night's gloom among them. And there was the packet, just as he had left it. A little smaller, perhaps, rather shrunken, but o therwise the same
as before.
Carefully he unwrapped them, laid them out on the ground with the parents flanking the children, holding hands as though they'd only started to walk over to the park together. But it
didn't work so well, this time. Parts kept coming off. He lost one of the woman's arms and though he tried and tried he could not reattach it. He studied them. In his eyes they looked like real people, and he guessed they had been, once. A real family, living in a house somewhere, like the one he used to live in with his mom and dad. The boy even looked a little
like him. Once, maybe, he'd fought with his sister, and skinned his knees and sneaked cookies out of the kitchen, when no one was looking.
No more, of course...
And yet...maybe...a little life remained, and could be coaxed into kindling again, like a campfire's flame.
He brought water from the pond and sprinkled it on them, but that only made things worse. The man's head came off, then the woman's. He sat back on his heels, watching. They were going. Going away, to some place he'd never been, for some purpose he could not fathom, leaving him behind, like people going through a door that opened only one way.
The boy wept, knuckling his eyes with his grimy fists. "You know what happened," he accused the trees. "You were here, you must have seed Did they drown, or what?"
The trees drew back, shaking their branches in denial. No, they hadn't seen, hadn't heard, they knew no more about this mysterious business than he did.
He rose to gather them up. But he must have moved a little too quickly, too carelessly, for an arm caught here and a foot there and the girl's body parted in the middle even as he picked her up; parts and pieces kept coming off and drifting away in the little breeze that blew around the
pond, to settle back to the pond again. he'd no idea how to stop this blind, inexorable process,
and though he worked desperately nothing helped; whatever he did it only made things worse, until the whole mass finally collapsed into a small handful of shreds like the dry skin that peels off your shoulders after you've been sunburned.
For a long time he stood holding all that remained in his cupped hands, weeping quietly over it while the trees watched in silence. Then he walked to the edge of the waiting pond and raised his arm. The breeze came up and took the last few scraps from him, bore them out over the surface of the water and laid them down. Slowly each little piece dissolved, and sank, and
vanished.
"All right, then," said the boy. "All right then. Goodbye."
He turned and walked away, not looking back.
The trees watched him go. They shook their branches gently, and shrugged, looking at one another in silence, until he was out of sight. Then they turned back to the waiting pond and to
their task: the observing of whatever else might occur to happen there.
You can also find chapters of my novel on my webpage at http://geocities.com/soho/village/5118