Macka Lake ✔ [short story]

MACKA LAKE | 2

There was a word for the Tads: Cephalopod. Cephalopodian.

The Law referred to them using the actual word, Cephalopodians, as if giving them an exotic word would somehow make them more humane, more beautiful. As if somehow, the word would make the Tads less like half-aliens that hatched like tadpoles from a tentacle monster raping a human sacrifice, make them more like humans, and make us looked past the fact that they tentacles for sexual reproductive organs and gills flaring under their ribs and jaws. What it did, though, was marking them superior in the society hierarchy, in the eye of the government and the politicians, reminding us to be obedient because the Cephalopodians knew every inch of us even if we didn't know anything about them.

The Tads looked like humans, but they weren't humans.

A lot of people struggled to accept that.

The Tads may have carried the physical appearances but they weren't some facets of the dead human's sacrifices. The Tads weren't parts of the dead person's soul, or representing the sins the human committed. The Tads weren't anything human.

Most people tried to explain the Tads' existence beyond the interspecies product, the same way they tried to reason Its existence. Always cycling back to the human as though we would be the most powerful part of the equation.

We weren't.

It didn't care. It just needed warm bodies—warm incubators—to mass produce hatches and clutches of itself.

The wallaby bodies that littered Macka Lake bank prior to human found plugged up and filled with alien eggs was proof of that. The deformed wallaby-with-tentacles that chased after and healthy wallaby was more than enough to drive home the message.

Maybe humans were the most compatible. Maybe not. Maybe, it didn't matter.

Maybe, this disaster could have been stopped if we were so egoistic and assumed It was after us, if we just packed up and moved away from the Lake instead of waging a war against this creature, instead of sending down marines and men to eliminate It only to realize too late that we were providing It ammunition.

Though it didn't matter, now, did it?

We were stuck here.

⸻

The Picking Date was announced the next day, the time plastered on the front page of every newspaper. The numbers stared wide-eyed at me, screaming in all-caps, rigid and bold.

Three more days. Seventy-two hours, before the next sacrificial deadline. A Sunday. We would be home for dinner.

Mum pinned the newspaper clip on our fridge and helped us select our best outfits. Ame meticulously shined her dress shoes the whole afternoon, choosing a simple, long blue dress that accented her lanky, skinny adolescent frame even more, and borrowed a ribbon from her friend to tie her hair. Sitting in our backyard chatting over the beers I had stolen from Lorgan's trunk, the sun chill on our skin, it was easy to close my eyes and pretend this was the normal, every day I could have. Easy to say there was nothing wrong in my life.