Short Stories And Stuff

The Pond

It was the first Friday of the New Year and Frank had sweaty fear all over his face. It was the first Friday of the New Year and Ron and Jack had decided it would be fun and swell to try and cross the pond where they would be swimming if it were summer.

Winter had been unusually warm; hopes of a white Christmas had drifted away with the greenness of the tree leaves, and finally with the leaves themselves. That was, until the sun rose grey and wet, the exact colour and hardness of moon, to fling hardened breath back at everyone's face. Snow fell in surprising clumps that clogged up driveways and fingerprinted windows, and when all was said and done Frank's street looked like some heavenly cream had been smeared over it, though the trees soon managed to wind-shake that cream off. In Frank's mind, winter had only truly begun on that bone-chilling day a few weeks ago. 

Ron and Jack had shown up on his doorstep this afternoon, an hour sooner than expected, red-faced from the cold, laughing an icicle-like laughter, nearly indistinguishable all bundled up in scarves.

"Come outside! Come outside!" they'd chanted, gesturing, and there was something infectious in the way they said it, something so full of excitement and anticipation, that Frank's heart thumped deeply, leading him to his own jacket and scarf.

They started running once he joined them, fly-gliding over the powdery street, laughing and red. They pointed across at the pond, at the strange fog that now covered it, and asked Frank what was on the other side. The pond looked like frosted glass, and the fog was like milk. 

"I don't know," Frank said.  He really, truly couldn't remember. All he could see was the cracked-ice surface of the pond and its velvet icing of fog.

Ron and Jack stared across the expanse with a blankness in their eyes. They were both too still, like child-sized trees. Then slow, icy smiles of wonder crystallized their faces; they turned back to Frank, and what they had once known to be square rows of another section of suburb, houses planted like timeless flowerbeds, became another world entirely, a country of colour and laughter and candy.

Finally, Ron shouted, and the shout was so clear and commanding it made Frank flinch.

"I want to find out!"

Ron's boot-clad foot was on the brittle ice, making the surface audibly flinch. And then the other joined it; the flinch was louder. He had his eyes trained on the fog-portal that would lead him to some magical place of eternal youth and siren song and unabashed adventure. 

His legs shook as he took another step. And another. And another. The ice creaked and cracked and seemed to be gnashing its teeth.

Frank watched Jack steel himself, before Frank made the ice groan as he went after Ron. The twins moved very slowly, ignoring the sounds of ice tearing around them, eyes transfixed by the powder-white curtain of fog.

Ron turned back, though it seemed to take effort, and beckoned Frank to join them.

Frank shook his head. The ice cracked further.

"We won't tell you what we find," Jack said without even turning back, "You'll never ever know what's on the other side." He spoke plainly, without an ounce of malice. He kept moving, and as he moved his voice faded, became harder to make out. "It's impossible to describe something perfectly, just as you experienced it. We can't ever tell you right."

Frank's face narrowed into a dark exclamation mark and inserted itself at the end of a capital No! Sweat pearled down his face, and his heart seemed to be sweating as well. The idea of them forever-knowing and him never-knowing was abhorrent. 

He looked at the pond through Ron and Jack's borrowed eyes and it wasn't such a big pond after all.

"I'm coming!" he cried. I'll get there first, he added for himself. 

He took off running, his big winter boots like two shuddering earthquakes upon the ice. Ron and Jack heard the tearing sounds of his arrival and turned away from the fog to look at him strangely. The world was one continuous thunder crack; Frank was its lightning. The ice scraped at his feet, tried to make him trip or slip. It grunted when it failed.

Soon Jack and Ron were watching Frank's back as he bounded over the ice on new feet. He was near, so near the wall of fog when both his feet seemed to sink holes into the ground and he lowered a full head lower to accommodate them. Ron and Jack could hear the cracking thunder from where they stood. It came in flashes and whip-strokes. And Frank was sinking. Sinking like light being absorbed into starved ground... 

Then the fog seemed to reach a fingernail toward him, to curl him up in its arm.

Did he slip through the ice? Or did the fog save him somehow? Frank and Ron couldn't tell. 

The cracking was gone, replaced by a cold sucking silence. 

Some guys in my class, thinking the Christmas break had begun, decided to walk across a barely-frozen river in celebration. They claimed they could hear the ice breaking around them, but kept on anyway. Lucky for them, they made it to the other side. Couple that with the pond behind my house, and you have The Pond.