The watcher

Fun, sun, boating, and swimming. Kids laughing and the occasional parent warning a child not to go too far out or get too deep. This is the river life. I live at the edge of the river and watch the people as they play at the edge of the water and swim out to the platform that was built years ago to dive from or lay in skimpy swimsuits soaking up the sun.

They laugh because they don't know. They don't know what lies beneath those sunkissed waves. Watching, waiting for the right moment to announce its presence. If they knew they would run screaming. Mothers would gather their children to their breast and hold them tight, screaming as they ran for safety. If only they knew what waited.

I have lived here my entire life and I know what the creature is and how it thinks, how it feeds. I know its needs, its desires. I am the 5th generation of keepers of the river. I was taught the craft by my mother who was taught by hers. People think that I am excentric with my long wild hair, symbolic chimes, and trinkets that hang from my home and pier. They laugh as I paddle my boat around the swimming area playing the small drum, chanting the songs of old. The songs of protection so they can swim and laugh as if they were really safe. I give them necklaces and anklets that I make. They think they are cute and charming. Little do they know they protect them even more from the creature as it slowly slithers below their kicking feet, tasting the water with its long forked tongue, wanting more. He sometimes wraps his long tongue around a sweet-tasting girl's ankle, giving it a little tug that takes her underwater. She thinks she is hung in some type of plant but is afraid that it might be something more. He lets her go as her friends jump in to help her onto the platform where she tells them 'it felt like a snake pulling her under but that she also would have sworn she felt a dead body rub across her leg too."

He drifts deeper. He is waiting for the right moment to strike. His thick, long, slick body looks and feels like the swollen body of a corpse that has long been in the water. Its skin peels leaving pieces of rotten flesh in its path as it slowly slithers across the bottom of the muddy river. Watching, waiting. An occasional frog or fish cross in front of him only to find death when his razor-sharp rolls of teeth shred them like a trash compactor shredding garbage. His blood red-eye with a single white pupil rolls in ecstasy as he salivates and swallows because he knows this is nothing compared to the human flesh he will soon devour. He is patient. He Waits. He Watches.

The sounds of the trinkets and the small drum remind him to stay in his area. He like myself and my family have been on this river for generations and he knows that starvation happens if the summer people stop coming. But he knows he must wait and he will as long as I do my job, the job of my ancestors. He will watch and wait.

When the last of the swimmers are gone for the day I can go into town for the evening. Everyone there knows me and appreciates what I do for the community. I don't think they realize I am saving the town as well as the summer lake people. They appreciate me because I am kind to strangers. I take them into my home when they are down and have nowhere else to go. They smile as they pass on their boats and see the poor soul sitting in the sun on my pier getting stronger by the day. Once they are better they can move on to a better place where they can be useful as they were meant to be. I am told continuously that the town folks are amazed at how quickly they move on, that I must be a miracle worker. I smile because I know in my heart I am needed here.

At night I sit in the quiet night on my pier drinking wine with a man I met in town. Then, I make my way downriver to where the water is shallow and murky. Dropping the offering to the beast to keep the good people safe for another day. The disgusting beast lies in the mud and stares at me with his horrible dead eye, with a half-mutilated body hanging from his bloody jaws, as if to say "you are no better than I am with what you do". But I am better! I protect the happy river people so they return each year and the town can thrive. It is the town's homeless, transient, horrible, and downtrodden that will never be missed that I feed him. It is their purpose. The reason they keep coming to our town.

I keep the town and the lake safe while he watches and waits for my next dinner date and my trip to the shallows.