She watched the murky green-grey water lap onto the shore with apprehension she couldn't explain. The thought of getting its spray on her made her skin crawl; the thought of stepping into it terrified her. It felt like a child's deep-seated fear of the dark, founded on nothing but what she couldn't see but no matter what she did she couldn't talk herself out of it.
Her cousins were playing in the water but they had long since given up trying to get her to join them.
"Just for a little while," They'd both coaxed.
"I can't." She'd replied.
"Just sit in the shallows," They'd suggested.
She just shook her head. They didn't understand that she physically couldn't get in the water. Her very being rebelled against the idea, she wasn't sure she could take even a single step closer to the waterline and she didn't want to try.
"It's no different than the lake across from the house," They told her.
But they were wrong.
She stared at the empty beach across the water for what felt like hours, surrounded by great rocks and peaks that hid the sky and made the beach impossible to get to without touching the foul drink.
She blinked and it was gone and all she could see was murky green-grey stretching out before her. Her heart clenched and fear rooted her feet to the grey sand, she could hear the water lapping ever closer but she couldn't look down, she couldn't look away from the never-ending horizon. She wanted to run, hide, close her eyes so she didn't have to look at it anymore but she couldn't make her body move, she couldn't make it stop.
She blinked and refused to open her eyes. The sound of the water echoed back at her, it lapped gently against the shore, and her cousins laughed nearby.
She felt the water heave.
Her eyes opened to the sight of the shore across from her again, just as she remembered it and she frantically looked down at her feet and found the water just where she had left it, a couple yards from her sandaled toes. She took a step back anyway.
Something was moving deep under the water, she couldn't see or hear it, but she could feel it in her bones the way some people felt storms. She opened her mouth to call to her cousins but they were already getting out of the water and she just found herself motioning vaguely up the beach towards the car as she started up the bank in a desperate attempt to avoid their dripping.
She trudged through a small wood until she got to the road and walked along the shoulder to the car, painfully aware of the murky water visible from over the tops of the trees.
She leant against the car while she waited, unable to turn her back on the lake. Something moved just under the surface of the water, vast and undulating, and she shivered as it disappeared into the murk again. A car passed behind her on the road, the wind from its passage blowing her hair into her face to cover her eyes, and by the time she'd managed to tame it again her cousins were breaking through the trees, complaining at her for not getting in the water with them.
They got in the car and pulled away, but still she couldn't look away from the now eerily still surface and turned in her seat to keep it in her sights until it was too far away to make out anything more than the peaks along the opposite shore. Her muscles loosened and her heart grew light as she turned back around in her seat, legs crossed beneath her. She looked down for her flip-flops and saw the trail of water trickling towards her from under her cousin's seat, soaking the bottoms of her sandals.
Her chest grew tight again; they were going to have to go in the trash.
