Lake Things
Created: 2024-08-08 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-21 (15:19:29)Status: completed
The one I rescued, I rescued from a bucket of undifferentiated critters someone had collected, all white or pink or faintly translucent and writhing together, unclear if they should develop into mammals, monotremes, reptiles or amphibians. Something in the bottom had already died and bloomed with worms and maggots, which crept out and over the sides as we worked to disentangle them.
The morning’s haul. If you walked the lake just after dawn you would find them washed up and struggling. There was no throwing them back in and here on the shore they just became prey for the gulls and ravens. A lone pelican sometimes flew down from some high mountain wetland. She would wade through the strand and gulp down every wriggling thing that had washed in. So what else could we do but collect them, put them in a bucket with a little lakewater to keep them wet and bring them back to be sorted as best it was possible to sort them.
The one I rescued was shorter than the others. Its skin was pale pink and wrinkled. I thought it might turn out to be a rat. No. Here was its poor mouth fringed with whiskers. It had no eyes, ears or limbs. I set it aside on a dry towel and went to find a milk bottle.
It developed quickly, as most things that come from the lake do. In the first couple days its legs and tail began to emerge. By the end of the week it had eyes, a stubby nose and thin grey fur sprouting patchily across its body. One morning it had wings. They were lacy like a dragonfly, translucent red-pink and too delicate to ever get it off the ground. Mostly it flit them reflexively trying to balance itself as it felt its way about.
It was impulsive as any other kitten. It still was not steady on its feet, so it compensated by charging forward in bursts, trying to get as far as it could before it tumbled over, tattered wings flitting. That was enough to tire it, for it to slow down and nestle in next to me as close as it could and sleep for hours.
It must have had a mother back in the lake, but then it had appeared at the shore with all the others. The ones that had survived had since become antechinus, microbats, dogs, frogs and skinks. I supposed that since it had still been a featureless thing when we found it, I might be the closest thing to its mother.
I thought about this sort of thing instead of everything else going on. The whole city had falled into the lake years before, into a great deep sinkhole no-one had known was even there until everything was buckling and sliding in. It was hard not to ascribe a sense of agency to the lake itself, already by then too toxic to step into and spitting out this unformed life and now taking great, deliberate bites out of its surroundings.
The buildings were still in a heap at the bottom of the sinkhole. The river poured into it, through it and into deeper subterranean chambers none of us would ever reach. There was a fine, perpetual mist surrounding it, which would have been pleasant if it did not hold in suspension all the same toxic pollutants that had been in the water. No. We all agreed there was no rebuilding there.
We had no idea what to do about anything else. We disagreed on how to house the unhoused, how to restore drainage and power, how to contain the spreading mist, what we would do if it all happened again and even more of what remained fell into the lake. Mostly we walked the shore and collected undifferentiated critters. That at least seemed manageable.
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Tags: @completed @fiction @vignettes
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