The Pond by Elin Olausson
I never wanted a pond. Would have preferred to sip coffee under the birches, read, but the children craved water. Little ducklings, people used to call them, twisting their rose-mouths into snappy beaks. The talk was one reason why we left town, the snooping neighbors asking the children about me. We got the house cheap, and I cared little about the fading paintwork and the mold stains. I was tired; I liked my trees. But the children came to me with crayon drawings of frogs and sea-birds, of shimmering koi. They brought the pond into our lives and it ate my birches, one at a time.
In the mornings, I woke to the sound of splashing. Grimy items found their way into the house: pebbles, damp twigs, strands of browning reeds. I made the children bathe every night but still they smelled like mud, like something left to rot. When they were sleeping, I wondered if something could be done about the pond. But I didn’t know a thing about gardening, I had no money for hiring someone, and I was tired. I figured that the pond would go away as the children grew, and I came into the habit of drinking my coffee in the kitchen, with the curtains drawn.
“We’ve got beetles now,” they told me one evening, dirtying the floor with their footprints. “We’ve got spiders and snakes.”
I combed the leaves out of their hair, mended the holes in their shirts. I started using the old porch door, since I could get to the car through that without having to see the pond. The children showed no interest in the ripe bananas I bought, the ice-cream and sticky chocolate. They came into the house at night, jaws working, hair dripping wet. They told me they had everything they had ever wanted.
Sitting in my curtained house, writing letters I’d never send, I listened to shrieks and laughter. There were other sounds, too, beastly, like the mud had sprouted claws and fur. I tried to remember what the children had been like in the beginning and saw nothing but their flailing arms, soiled by blood.
“We’ll be with you forever,” they said, those ghost-like babies and the creatures they had become. “We’ll all be together in the water.”
I crouched in the corners, swallowing bananas that had turned black. I scrubbed the floor but the stains kept growing, patterns made by tiny feet. Outside: splashing, laughter. Something growing that hadn’t come out of me. When I asked, they said that they were happy here. When I mentioned town, they didn’t speak at all.
At some point I would have been able to leave, but I didn’t have it in me. I slept. The morning when I had the last of the chocolate bars, that was when I noticed the water. Dirty, cold, a few inches deep. Covering the kitchen floor, littering the living room with leaves and gravel. Mouth numbed by chocolate, I waded through. Opened the front door and let the water eat me, calves, kneecaps. The garden was gone, the house sinking in a marshy sea.
“Children!” I cried. “You should come in now.”
Splashing. Laughter. The sunlight glittering on the surface of this new world with no trees to sit under, and no place to return to.
“We don’t want to come,” they told me, their voices rising from somewhere just out of reach, somewhere deep. “We want to stay.”
I pressed my hands down into the slimy water and imagined their hands finding mine, their little fingers holding on as I pulled.
Then I unclenched my fists and let go. I fell back into the pond and thought that maybe, at the bottom, I would find my trees.
Elin Olausson is a fan of the weird and the unsettling. She is the author of the short story collections Growth and Shadow Paths and several Swedish novels in the horror, romantic fantasy and historical fiction genres, and has had stories featured in Chiral Mad 5, Gamut, Weird Horror, and many other publications.
Elin’s rural childhood made her love and fear the woods, and she firmly believes that a cat is your best companion in life. She lives in Sweden.
