The Creature in Pawtuckaway Lake

The Thaw

The barely there sunlight tickled her eyelids open that first morning on the lake and they fluttered prettily in the still air of the bedroom. The right side of her face mashed against the pillow, she stared lazily out the window at the serene lake.

There, in the middle of the quiet, blue pool, flipped an enormous, dark and gleaming tail almost 40 feet high in the air, flexing reptilian-like, wider in circumference than a Mac truck tire. It disappeared beneath the waters in a fraction of a second, leaving behind just the faintest ripples, a seamless re-entry into the waters.

She almost thought it was strange but drifted back to sleep before the garbled thought became reality.

She had been up late the night before working on her stories and today, her head felt like it was packed entirely with cotton. Swaths of it stuffed into every inch of her head, packed in the inseams of her squiggly brain and insulating her neural circuits, coming out of her ears in tufts like an old man's aural crowns.

The world was a muffled and distant tenor from where she was slipping into a dream, a woozy circus wherein the real and surreal gleefully play and serve cocktails, bucking the rules of physics.

Here, she is atop a ship, a small one that rocks in the waves. Her hair is enraptured by the wind and the two whip around her face in a violent and chaotic romance.

To her left, encroaches a brewing storm and with it, the atmosphere on the lake has taken a sudden turn. The surrounding trees are bending back and forth atop their burrowed roots and creaking wildly the forest floor. The skies transition into a dark gloominess and then she feels a strange stillness hold the moment thick.

It becomes palpable like she can reach out and grab hold of the air with her hand. And this electricity, this presence, descends over her like a vacuum. The moment, the space, the cells in her bloodstream, the very molecules in her body all pause, all are preserved, all stop in their tracks. She feels sick. Her legs wobble and her vision blurs.

Suddenly, a viciously loud and hard thwack slaps the surface of the lake, breaking the moment of preservation, of transcendent time, and the edge where air meets water.

Her vision goes out and she feels herself falling easily through that once-thick air. She notices the sweet scent of cinnamon and a veil of misty vapor spray across her cheeks.

The Dream

The sun is high in the sky and it perturbs her with its brightness. There is a stillness in the bedroom which, as she lays there longer, she can feel permeate the entire house, right into its very bones.

The bedroom is beautiful, light, and airy with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the lake and sparsely decorated. The bed is buttressed by two night stands and the only other furniture is a single large dresser and a desk with its complementing chair.

Her ears prick with the slightest oscillation of a humming silence as she bathes in the quiet morning. It is so peaceful here she could just become one with the silence and break away with the wind. The world and all its blaring headlines is galaxies removed from this place in the woods and can stay out for all she cares.

She relaxes further into bed listening to the sounds of the house and hears the punctuated snores of Rory the Rottweiler float up from downstairs. Sighing, she slowly rolls over to the right side of the bed where a small, colored notebook lays askew on the nightstand with a pen slung onto its front cover haphazardly.

Holding the cap sturdy between her teeth, she unclips the pen from its holster with one hand and sifts through the pages of the journal with the other. Coming to a fresh space, she scrawls loosely across the top - March 1, 2020.

Pausing, she closes her eyes momentarily before continuing on: I was on a boat, maybe a pirate's boat. There was something in the water that I couldn't see but could feel.

She holds her pen over the page as it trembles with minute waves, her mind strains to recall the events of her dream. A blot of ink jumps onto the page and spreads into a blotch on the paper as she closes her eyes and goes over it again.

I was on a boat ... it was grey all around. There was something in the water ... And ....

As she grasps at the threads of the night, she has something valuable, a missing piece, lassoed in the rope of her memory and as she reels it into her consciousness, she can feel it tugging at the other end, a struggling, flopping fish. Her mind leans in as the end of the line draws near and gropes its fingers forward, feeling for the edges and ... "Honey!" Cooper calls up the stairs and the tiny hammer and anvil in her ear go ringing like an alarm.

She opens her eyes and stares down at her paper. It is gone. She thinks about it, that information, that missing part of her dream, disappearing like a wisp of vapor in the vastness of the atmosphere as if it never existed at all.

The Ritual

Naked, she descends the stairs. When possible, this is her preference, and being holed up in a cabin in the woods lends itself well to an aspiring nudist.

"Hi, Rory," she murmurs, giving him a sturdy rub on his head. He blinks gratefully back and watches as she makes her way over to the informal coffee station in the kitchen.

The coffee beans, grinder, cheerful plastic spoon for measuring out a precise tablespoon, and large percolator all sit in the corner together, ready for their morning duty.

Thoughtfully, she considers the shiny, dark brown beans, their symmetry and the groove that runs down their length. The smell is seductive and rich, she wants to lap it all up like a cat with cream.

From behind, Cooper swoops in and gives her a tight hug. She yelps, startled, and a few beans scatter, bouncing on the granite counter. "Hey, good morning!" She feigns cheerfulness. She was never very good at that but had gotten much worse with age. Its utility had outworn its purpose.

Crinkling his brow, he looks quizzically at her. He hesitates before asking, "How did you sleep?"

It was only a few years ago they had met. She had taken an impromptu vacation and road tripped to New Orleans. Her job as the bartender of a busy restaurant downtown wore down on her ever since the new management came in.

They took the bones of the best dive bar in town and "upgraded" it to a hipster hangout where everybody wore glasses and lavender infused beer was on the menu. She much preferred the days when it was just the old war vet and homeless Jack sitting at her bar, nursing their cheap beer and paying in conversation. Eventually, the whole original crew began to disband and that's when she got in her car and drove out of the city, heading South.

She didn't know where she was heading then, just getting out of there. Out of town. Out of sight. Somewhere she didn't need to be someone for anyone.

"Good," She resumes grinding up the beans, scooping up the runaways back into the bag. The motor in the coffee grinder whirs as the whole beans clang about before smoothing into a sandy consistency letting her know they're ready. Her mind drifts back to her dream.