The Pond

Short stories are my vice, they are the place where I can write anything and everything I want. It can be as delectable, as horrid, as joyous, and rancid as possible. They can be emotionless or they can be so full of emotion that they are written from my very own bones, and blood, and half beating heart. I almost think more about what metaphors and meaning I put into a short story than I do with a full novel. I treat them with more poeticism, more akin to song lyrics that have danced between my ribs for a long while. Torn from them to be woven more succinctly.

This story, The Pond, is a desperation I can't be rid of at the moment. To be free. And where life is taking me at the moment, towards that ideal, it seems the perfect first story to share.

The Pond

I don’t know how long I laid in the garden. The soft tick, tick, tick of my father’s pocket watch in my hand both a sound of solace and misery. Another hour, another day, another week.

Another year. 

Two years and three quarters months tomorrow to be more precise.

How long you had been gone.

I opened my eyes, suffocated by the pollen tacked to every blade of grass. Irritating and uncomfortable, perhaps, but overtly familiar and sentimental. My fingers lingered over the fine powders that burned my throat and suffered my eyes, neither much of a weapon to my disjointed reality. There was a pleasant hum from bumble bees, the slowing sound of the birds chirps, and it coaxed me from a melancholy. 

Not merely sorrow, rather what father and Doctor Renley called my “episodes.” A blunt word, one mother and I would disagree with entirely. Yet her opinions of me, of my state, dwindled with every passing day. 

It made me question whether I was truly sane or entirely unwell as they said. One could never know if the state of their own mind was indeed troublesome, or if they were entirely normal for having such concerning thoughts. Was I a fantasist? Or a realist digging for the answers none had yet discovered?

One might argue both. 

The sun was slowly fading in the civil twilight. The only time they let me roam. It was risky this time of night. My fair skin wouldn't burn, but the monsters that called were just barely out of reach. Though, they forgot that there were always monsters scraping for a piece of my mind.

They clung to me like I had made a deal with whatever god tormented the night. Soaked my skin in its blood until it ran through my own veins. 

That was what the voices said.

Huddled here in the grass, near dusk, was when they always came out. When I finally felt at home in my own bones. Sinking my toes through grass and plucking daisies and dandelions.

There was a whisper coming from the pond. There often was, harassing my imagination until I would shred my own skin with my own fingernails. The proof in the jagged, stinging lines left behind to heal under shiny pink skin. The voice coaxed me to do it. 

“Follow me, and all your desires will come true,” it said, like always.

The worst part was that it sounded like you. 

Every single time.

But it wasn’t.

You were dead.

Madeline Vaspar was dead.

I saw it happen. Your head sinking beneath the murky water, never resurfacing. My screams as the peelers waded in to search for your body, my shrieks still ricocheted in my ears. 

They never found it.

In the small pond of our family home, you were never found. That was when I first knew that the darkness existed. That it was not merely illusion crafted from our desperate minds.

That was the day I learned that dreams were only nightmares covered in dazzling desires and glittering wants.

You had taken my soul with you too. When you died.

My bliss, and my excitement, and my reason. All gone without the sound of your laughs when we would sit and babble for hours. Your chiding when I did something ill mannered in front of others besides yourself. The stories you would tell me long after we were supposed to be asleep.

I resented you, for a time. For leaving me behind to dwell in this uncertainty without you. I needed you, but instead I had to stare at what took you from my side every single day. I was weaker without you.

I crept closer to the edge of the sinister ripples.

The pond was not that deep, but it carried secrets. Enough that we used to imagine that other worlds may be hiding beneath the dredged leaves and moss. 

That ghosts lingered in the beds. That nixies had dragged them to their death.

How foolish we had been.

Little girls draped in imagination, of fairies and sirens. Of soldiers and pirates. It did us no good, only brought about a terrible disaster. 

The nostalgia, the uncanny fantasies that were wrought from me that day haunted my every waking hour. Some said it was madness, enough that Bedlam would consider me a candidate for permanent confinement. 

Mother wouldn’t let that happen. She bargained with father and came to an arrangement that sated them both. But it equivocally starved me.   

“I’m to be married next month,” I whispered into the water, hoping that you may hear the dread I could never show. The light shutter in my words only for your ears. 

“To that awfully awkward boy, Arthur,” I sighed, “do you remember him? He’s the one who nearly sank our boat on the Thames.”

He was kind enough, not dreadful as some of my friend’s husbands were to them. Still, a consolation was not what I wanted. And benignity only lasted so long. Madeline would have known. 

“Father hasn’t given me any choice,” I said, my toes squirmed in the grass, “lest I wish to be locked up. They say my grief isn’t normal.” That I must have someone to keep a watchful eye on me, and that Arthur Wellock could do so. 

They did not, however, take into consideration that the boy was a well known fool who hardly paid any mind to anything at all. 

You would have known. You would have stopped it. 

My voice cracked as I inched closer to the pond, “I don’t want to marry him,” shaky and desperate and entirely alone. 

I didn’t. There was so much I wanted to do, and that was one thing that I never did desire. Trapped and shackled into an unfeeling “love.”

I couldn’t bear to be a pretty, tamed wife on the arm of a banker. I couldn’t bear to be a mother to children that would only tire of my word because "papa" was ultimately, unfortunately, the head of household. I wouldn’t bear a constant watch over me as though my mind were worthy of an asylum. I was not good at sitting still for others to gawk at. I was too blunt to be the delicate woman a husband could bring to parties and parade around to his employers to gain favor. I was never meant to be anything but a girl in a garden humming with the tune of the bees buzz and the pond's lap. 

I did not ask for anything more. 

There was a low hiss coming from the dull water. A ripple gentle enough that it could have been the flicker of the fireflies beginning their haunt on the night. I crawled closer, to the edge where reeds had barely begun to sprout. Mud was slippery and wet on my fingers, dying, stiff grass pricked at my palms.

There was a dark figure slinking under the surface, a shadow. It was human in shape, but no features marked it. 

“Come with me,” it sung. A siren of sorts. Or the ghosts we had cultivated. Its song so alluring, so convincing. I stuck my hand into the pond. It wrapped fingers around my wrist and lured me into the water.

It was cold, almost like death. 

“Evelyn!” Father’s voice called from the house, laden with the sound of solace. Of misery. I waded further into the water with the figure, till I was waist deep and my skirts weighed me down. It crawled up my bodice and left an icy chill on my skin. 

I heard my name again. 

“Evelyn.”

I took another step. Imagining a life where I could escape that call. The ceaseless discontent in that one sound. 

“You could have it all,” the figure said.

It was a pretty life. One where I could sit all day in the sun. Where I could dine on anything I desired without scolding and dance under the stars. Where I could gallivant with my friends without the permission of their men. Where my sister was alive again and sitting beside me every step of the way.

“Evelyn.” 

He could keep calling.

But she was dead. Evelyn Vaspar was dead. She would be in the end. Baptized new by the others lost to this pond, gone from the world and forgotten. That was what was expected. That is what I fulfilled. I was no longer her.  

I could hear the pocket watch on the bed. Tick. Tick. Tick. 

A distant recollection, a distant farewell. 

The figure's grip around my wrist loosened, not enough for me to pluck my hand from the shadowy, slim fingers. I wouldn’t bother to anyway. It was giving me what I wanted. 

You. 

Your face appeared in the water, the hand on me was yours. I wished I could feel the embrace of my sister's arms. Just once. That was all. No matter how I needed to do it, I would. 

The reflection of you was so appealing. The freedom to do as you craved. 

I wanted that. And men only wished me to be in a cage. A pretty bird with no will of my own. They drove us to madness and expected us to worship at their feet. Beg them for forgiveness when they did all the harm. 

The darkness was real. It lived in us. It starved us until we all thought ourselves mad. It enraged us until we were sure we were the evil in the world. It was planted there to grow its roots in our bones. To pass from mother to daughter until one was fervent enough to use its long and treacherous wounds. It would die in us, until we were finally dug from our unmarked graves.

Then the next little girl would find its use. 

“Come, dear girl, your sister is waiting,” it said, and I smiled.

My head was drawn below the water. I didn’t suffocate. I didn’t drown. I just sank. Down, down, down. Into a world of dark. 

But I felt a hand in mine, familiar and solid. No longer alone. No longer afraid. No longer caged. 

You were free, and so would I be.