There is a girl in the pond out the back of my home.
We have never spoken – in fact, I don’t know if she can speak. I have never seen her mouth open, though I have imagined it, imagined her bottom jaw opening wide, then wider, imagined a residue not dissimilar to sap stretching long and thin between her lips. Sometimes, when I dream of her, the sap separates in time for a beetle to crawl from beneath her tongue – as black as her pupils, her hair, the surface of the pond when I peer out my window at night to see if she’s watching me.
I don’t know her name, though sometimes I feel as if it is stuck at the back of my mind whenever I see a single red mite on the wall outside my cottage, or walk through the ghost of a spider’s web, eyes turned to the darkening canopy of the forest. On the worst days, when the unending stretch of greenery beyond my home feels as confining as a wild ocean, I consider asking her name. Inviting her inside. Will she drink tea? I ask myself. Will she take it with sugar?
More than once I have dreamt of her body floating above mine as I sleep.
Her expression never changes, and it has occurred to me before that she is likely dead, given living people don’t often reside in ponds. Certainly not the one behind my home, with its moss-plagued edges and fly carcasses speckling the surface that remind me of the popcorn ceiling in my grandmother’s living room. The trees surrounding it have always bowed towards the pond, narcissus seeking his own reflection. Though they seem to stoop lower these days, as if they crave her company, crave the caress of the water from which she rises, her hair splayed across the surface like a spider’s legs twitching before they curl inward and turn cold. I feel the pull too, sometimes. Feel it when it seems like the sun will never rise.
I think she comes into my house on those nights. The ones where the ceiling seems miles away and my heart feels like it will push its way up my throat. I hear her as I stare into the dark – hear her bare feet on the floorboards as she walks past my room, the squelch of her waterlogged soles as she wanders. Other nights, when I can no longer bear the darkness of my own four walls, I feel her as I walk to the bathroom – feel her the way you feel the task at hand you have just forgotten, or the way you feel the silence during an electric cut. I consider looking up or behind, knowing she will be there – in the shadows, in the mirror, her milky eyes peering at me round the side of a door – but it seems wrong to only speak to her in those moments, to look a dead girl in the eye when jealousy boils in mine.
Once, I walked to the pond’s edge, ignored the weight of the trees’ shadows as they whispered to one another. It was the middle of the day, but I knew she had to be in there. Where else was there for the dead to go if not the weightless dark of deep water? I peered into the pond, disregarded the way my hair looked black when reflected at me among the moss. I imagined her emerging suddenly from its unbroken surface and grabbing at my face with her warped nails – imagined them raking down my cheeks, the splintering pain of skin
peeling from muscle. Though it was not blood or flesh I pictured on her hands – it was dirt, caked beneath her fingernails, stuck in the lines of her palms. I imagined the feeling of roots unravelling from my cheeks, the tickle behind my eyes as they’re pulled from my sinuses, the twitch of my eyelid and upper lip as I look to the sky above – blue, behind the trees. I imagined it was blue, and I was made of dirt, and she was a nymph beckoning me back to the soil from which I crawled.
The walk back to my home had been slow, and I couldn’t be certain if I was imagining the prickle of eyes against my back. The longer we co-exist, the more days that pass in silence, the more I feel those eyes. When I turn the kettle on, when I watch television, when I bow my head to read my phone. Though the pond is at the bottom of the garden, I can never be certain she hasn’t trodden across the grass to watch over my shoulder, her sopping hair and dirty feet marking my floor as she lingers behind me.
She is a wretch, a thing of nightmares, the sort of creature that makes men drop to their knees before crosses. She is the coin on which fear is heads and violence is tails. She makes me want to push her back below the water, mouth gaping and eyes wide; she makes me want to hide beneath my covers and pray for sunrise.
But as I watch her from my bedroom window, her skin fluorescent under the moon as the top of her head peers at me above the inky water, I can only think of how blissful it must feel to drown.
Becki Richardson
Rebecca Richardson is an MA Publishing student at York St John University. She is a lover of the gothic and the sublime and finds her inspiration in both the roughened landscapes of the North and the spooky implications of being an autistic woman. Her work has featured in two editions of Wilson’s Tales of the Borders and her notes app. You can find Rebecca on Twitter: @roo_richardson .
Image by Chloe Lam on UnSplash.