The Pond That Forgot How to Be Afraid

The tadpoles were too easy to catch.

Maya noticed it before Soren did, the way she noticed most things, without being able to say why yet. She scooped her cup through the brown water near the cattails and came up with four of them, fat and slow, swimming in lazy circles like they had all the time in the world.

"Last summer they bolted," she said. "You couldn't get near them. They felt your shadow."

"Maybe these are dumber," Soren said. He was crouched on the concrete lip of the pond with his notebook on his knee, drawing the shape of the bank. He liked to map a place before he trusted what was in it.

"They're not dumber. They're the same kind." Maya tilted the cup. One tadpole drifted right up to the wall of it and bumped its nose, unbothered. "Something's different. Not them. The pond."

Soren looked up. He had learned that when Maya said something was different, the thing to do was not argue but look harder.

So they looked.

The water was clearer than last year. They both remembered it green and soupy, full of the little darting bugs that skated the surface. Now the surface was glassy and still. No water striders. No backswimmers. No clouds of those tiny jerking specks that Soren had once spent twenty minutes trying to name.

"Where did the bugs go," Soren said. It wasn't quite a question.

Maya was already wading deeper, her sneakers giving up entirely. "And the snails. Remember the snails on the cattail stems? Hundreds." She ran her hand up a green stalk. It came away clean.

That was when the shadow moved under the water.

It was long and pale and fast, and it crossed the open middle of the pond in one smooth line and was gone into the murk near the drain pipe. Bigger than anything that belonged here. A pond like this had minnows and tadpoles and bugs. It did not have something the length of Maya's forearm.

"Did you see that," she breathed.

"I saw it." Soren was on his feet now, notebook forgotten. "That's not from here."

They waited, dead still, until it came again. This time it slowed near the cattails, and they got a real look. A flat snake-shaped head. A long body mottled brown and gold. A mouth that, when it opened to take a drifting tadpole, opened like a door.

It took the tadpole without hurrying. The tadpole did not even flinch.

"It's not afraid of us," Soren said. "And they're not afraid of it."

Maya stood very still in the warm shallow water and felt something tip over in her mind.

"That's the whole thing," she said slowly. "That's why they're easy to catch."

Soren waited. He could tell she was running ahead of herself and he didn't want to break her stride.

"The fast tadpoles," Maya said. "The ones that bolted last summer. The ones that felt your shadow and ran. Where are they?"

And then she answered her own question, and her voice went quiet.

"It ate them. It ate the scared ones first. The ones that knew how to be afraid."

Soren felt the cold of it move up his arms even in the heat. He looked at the four fat tadpoles in Maya's cup, drifting, calm, bumping the plastic.

"The ones left are the ones that don't run," he said. "Because nothing here ever taught them to run from that." He pointed at the dark water where the long shape had gone. "There's never been one of those in this pond. Not in their whole lives. Not in their parents' lives. They don't have the part that says be afraid of that."

"Nobody ever needed it," Maya said.

They stood with it. The pond was so quiet. No striders. No snails. No clouds of bugs. Just the glassy water and the cattails and one long pale animal that had emptied the whole place out, not because it was cruel, but because everything here met it for the first time without knowing what it was.

Soren crouched and opened his notebook again, flipping back to last summer's pages. There it was, in his own handwriting. Surface alive with striders. Snails on every stem. Tadpoles fast, hard to catch. He had written hard to catch and underlined it.

"It's like the pond forgot something," Maya said. "Except it never knew. You can't forget a thing you never learned."

"Somebody dumped it," Soren said. He was sure of this the way he got sure of things, by working backward. "A pet, maybe. Got too big for a tank. They thought they were being kind. Let it go somewhere with water." He looked at the drain pipe. "And it walked into a place where nothing had a single defense against it. Not the snails. Not the bugs. Not the tadpoles. Every animal here grew up safe from exactly this and only this."

Maya looked down at her cup. Four calm tadpoles. The last of a pond that used to be afraid in all the right ways and now was afraid of nothing, which was the same as being doomed.

She thought about how a thing could be deadly not because it was strong but because it was new. Because everyone it met had spent ten thousand years getting ready for the wrong dangers. The heron. The dry summer. The bigger frog. Nobody had spent even one year getting ready for this.

"That's terrifying," she said. And then, because it was also the most interesting thing she had ever stood inside of, "that's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard."

Soren was already writing it down, because the inside of his head had gotten too small to hold it. The whole pond, rewritten by one animal that walked in the wrong door. He wrote: defenses take a long time to grow and no time at all to be useless.

The drain pipe was a foot wide. It ran under the parking lot. It went, Soren knew, to the creek. And the creek went to the river.

Maya followed his eyes to the pipe, then past the parking lot, to where the land sloped down and away toward water they couldn't see.

She lowered her cup gently back into the shallows and let the four tadpoles swim free, and watched them drift, unhurried, toward the open middle of the pond.