Lights Out

The Closing

In all my life I've never felt fear. I've never had the feeling of cold air dragged across my flesh and my mounting panic causing me to scream in fright. I've never had a reason to. But now, looking into the cool water of the lake and watching my face wink back at me, I learned what it felt like.

The me in the water rose up, clamped onto my shoulders with arms reeking of rotting plant matter and mud, and dragged me down into the depths. Underneath the water I saw bodies, maybe twenty that were intact but the lake floor was littered with shiny white bones picked clean by fish and animals. The other me pulled me down, down, down until I was tangled up in massive groves of green tentacles. It smirked at me, pleased, and then swam away with a glorious shining fish tail.

I waited to die but I didn't. With each passing moment my lungs screamed for oxygen and when I finally gave in and sucked in water, the painful feeling went away. I thought it was death coming but instead, I felt invigorated. I gulped more water and was amazed to see that it didn't hurt and it wasn't killing me. I was living underwater.

Gradually, my body changed to accommodate my new ability. I grew a tail like the other me which was painful but not as much as the webbing between my fingers and toes, that grew in the slowest. Soon I was able to swim around with the other me, munching on the fish food bodies on the bottom of the lake. Some had fish like qualities and I realized they were failed experiments.

Other people came to our lake. Some we ate joyfully while they struggled in the water and others we tried to make like us. I realized the other me didn't actually look like me, he only changed his face to trick me into getting close to the water. It was a smart ploy I realized I could do with ease. But it soon became cramped in the little lake with two of us and we did the only thing we could've. I enjoy his rotting corpse as a snack from time to time.