lake things

written 20240808.

the one i rescued, i rescued from a bucket someone had collected of undifferentiated critters, all white, or pink. or faintly translucent and writhing together, unclear if they should turn out to be mammals, or monotremes, or reptiles, or amphibians. something in the bottom had already died and bloomed with true 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’d 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’d wade through the strand and gulp down every wriggling thing that washed in. so what else could you 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 as it was possible to sort them.

the one i rescued was a little 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, or 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 had begun to emerge. by the end of the week it had eyes, a stubby nose and thin grey fur sprouting 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 as it felt its way about out, reflexively or as a way of trying to balance itself.

it was still as impulsive as any other kitten. it still wasn’t 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 as close as it could, and sleep for hours.

did it have a mother? it must have, but then it had appeared at the strand with all the other lifeforms, the other ones which survived had since become antechinus, microbats, dogs, frogs and skinks. so who knows. i supposed that since i collected it and fed it when it was still a featureless thing, that might make me its mother.

i thought about this sort of thing, instead of thinking about everything else going on. the city had fallen into the lake a couple years before, into a great deep sinkhole no one had known was there until everything was buckling and sliding in. it was hard to not ascribe some agency to the lake itself, already too toxic to step into and spitting out life of its own, and now taking big, deliberate bites out of the overworld.

the buildings were still in a heap at the bottom of the sinkhole. lake waters poured into it, through it and into deeper subterranean chambers no one would ever be able to reach. there was a fine, perpetual mist surrounding it which would have been pleasant if it didn’t hold in suspension all the same toxic pollutants that had been in the water. no. we all agreed. there was no rebuilding there.

we disagreed on everything else. the collapse spurred those of us who stayed to new levels of civic engagement. we disagreed on how to house the now unhoused, how to get the drainage and power running again, how to contain the mist, what we would do if it all happened again, if more fell into the lake. and, what to do about the creatures washing up in ever greater numbers along the strand.