A Ghost In The Water

• Melissa Thomas, Grade 10, Elwood College
• Short Story
• 2017

Excellence Award in the 'Spread The Word 2017' competition

The lake is eerily placid at night. Trees branch over the dappled water to create sinister shadows, and the pale moon reflects bands of poorly resplendent starlight on the wavering surface beneath. Clouds unmannerly obscured the brightest stars, so the black sky stretching interminably across the forlorn canopy of trees felt more like a suffocating blanket.
My heart pounded out an irregular rhythm after flying through the woods and my breath came in short gasps. I watched each frosty exhalation with interest, noticing how the minute fog disappeared into the biting air as if it had never been there to begin with. The edge of the glacial lake tickled my feet, initiating a tremor that reached every vertebrae of my body. In mere seconds, slight contact with the mid-winter water had already clamped its chill around my stomach with a formidable grasp, sawing a bitterness through my bones so intense it seemed to want to permanently remain.
Standing with my feet in a pool of cut ice on such a dark evening, I felt like the only person in the world. To be fair, I always felt that way. Even from here, I could see the smoke rising out of the penumbra of the treetops where my despondent cabin lay. I saw in my mind the crisp, single bed that looked like it had never been slept in, the dusty red chair that sat incongruously in the middle of the one-room log house, and the dozens of littered books on the floor echoing the apparition whom had ostensibly once resided there. Compared to the menacing, night-blazed lake, the dejected cabin could seem cosy, but to me, out here is where I have always belonged.
I closed my eyes to remember the warmth of the sun bathing my young face, the swirling melody of the birds calling through the foliage, and the mist clinging to a tiny fishing boat lulling at the lake’s crest. The cold fingers curling around my spine loosened as I envisioned the man with an auburn beard and crinkling brown eyes emerging from the depths with droplets streaming from his scarlet hair, to return to the little girl with copper locks that had sent him tumbling from their precariously aged ship.
I shook away from the impotent imagination and instead stretched my thoughts to the lake’s floor, feeling for the sand beneath like an electric pull to grope some sort of eidolon. My heart seized as I reached forward, though I felt nothing around me save for the pressure of the dense waters.
Though my gut wrenched in fury, I forced my eyes open to stare hopelessly at the lake’s incessant expanse. I wished to search endlessly for the man under the sea with a sopping auburn beard and crinkling dark eyes, though I was at least bright enough to realise that it was futile to look for a spectre who had fallen eleven years ago. Even when that man had been my father.