Songbirds After Dark

Addie I

The fire looked soft to Addie. She knew it was made of heat and pain, but for some reason every bone in her body wanted to reach out and touch it. Her mother was sitting next to her, and Addie knew she would be ticked if she had to tend to Addie's burned hands, but Addie found herself reaching towards it anyways. When she could feel the radiating heat against her fingers, her mother swatted her hand away. "Y'know better than that, Adelaide," she said.

"Sorry," Addie said, even though she wasn't. The campsite was colder this winter than last, and Addie wanted to feel warm.

"Adelaide!" Her father called her from beside the half-frozen lake. "Come and give me a hand!" Addie untangled herself from the nest of blankets by the soft fire, put on a yellow jacket and picked her way towards the water. She was wearing a pair of blue shoes she was particularly fond of, and she didn't want them to get any muddier than they already were.

"Yeah?" she asked when she was next to him.

"I've got a fish on my hook, but there's something wrong with the rod and I can't quite reel it in. Be a doll and pull in the line for me?" Addie looked down at the mud and grimaced.

"'Kay," she said. She took hold of the line as best she could without stepping in the grey-brown mud and pulled. The fish on the hook was more stubborn and stronger than she expected, and Addie had to put her weight into her pulling, leaning back on heels of her blue shoes. The fish on the hook suddenly gave a powerful tug, ripping Addie off of the ice.

The world spun around Addie like a hula hoop as she was dragged down deeper into the water. By the time she thought to let go of the line she could barely see the light above her through the brown water. Addie swam towards the light as her lungs screamed, but she only made it a fraction of the way before she ran out of air. Addie's body defied her mind and she let the muddy water fill her lungs. It didn't choke her like she expected it to, instead she found herself able to breathe it in like soggy swamp air. She floated in the water, marveling at the fact she was alive, until a mammoth green-brown eel-like creature swam past her, its mouth ajar, exposing vicious-looking teeth. The sight of those giant teeth, each one probably the size of her hand, was more than enough to withdraw Addie from her state of shock. She kept swimming up, and in what felt like seconds she breached the surface. The lake was much wavier than it had felt from below the surface or looked from above. Addie found that she could barely get her head above water for more than a few moments, much less keep it there long enough to look for shore, so she swam to her left and hoped that it would bring her to land. After minutes of struggling against the current, Addie felt slimy mud against her fingertips. Thrashing with newfound determination, she managed to set her feet in the mud and kick her way onto the shore.

She crawled up, away from the water, until she was on solid land, and then collapsed, exhausted from her underwater struggle. It was only then that Addie realized she was still wearing her jacket. The yellow cloth was heavy with moisture, and as she shed it she was frustrated with herself for not realizing sooner that it had probably impeded her swimming. She tied it around her waist; without her jacket on, Addie felt that something was wrong as she looked around, and soon realized that she wasn't cold. Across the lake she could see the ground that had been her family's campsite, but it was vacated. There wasn't so much as a granola wrapper left on the ground to indicate that anyone had ever been there. Addie looked up and down the shore, but there was nowhere for her to cross over to the former campsite. Apart from where she had climbed ashore, her side of the river was lined with cattails taller than her. Seeing no other good options, Addie decided to make her own path through the cattails.

However, she found that she didn't need to make her own path. The reeds parted around her like they were scared to touch her, giving her a berth of several meters. Addie noticed that their roots left grooves in the ground as they fled. She walked through tenaciously, holding her heavy yellow coat in one hand. She spotted something dark in the mud. Addie walked over to it, her feet making squishy sounds in the mud, and picked it up, wiping it off on the soaked leg of her pants. It was a pair of sunglasses, with a tortoiseshell frame and one of the lenses missing. Addie brushed off an insect wing that had plastered itself to the remaining lens, and noticed big, cicada-like bugs half-buried in the ground around her. She became aware of the drone of insects in the reeds, and as she became aware of it she felt like it was getting louder and louder.