Member-only story
The Girl Beneath the Lake
She was a tale that felt older than time.
Beneath the lake there was a girl.
I couldn’t tell you her name. She had been there as long as I could remember. I still could recall being a young boy grasping my mother’s hand as she tried to lead us away from the lake’s edge.
“Mommy,” I said, my voice keening in a whine, “there’s a girl in the water. I see her.”
“Just ignore it, Randy,” my mother said. It. Like the girl was a creature or a monster to be feared. Even as my mother tugged on my hand to get us to the nearby bus stop, I still kept sneaking glances back as if afraid the girl would crawl out of the water and chase after us.
But by the time I was fourteen, my mother was dead. My grandmother came to live in our rickety old house with its crooked roof and an overgrown garden in the backyard. Grandma didn’t care what I did with my time as long as I stayed in school and got good enough grades that might help lead to a well-paying job someday.
In those years, when I was chased around the football field at school by boys who were twice the size of me, I took every chance to go to the lake.
No one bothered the girl there, so no one bothered me along the lake’s parameters either.
