I rode my bike all the way down to the community pond, settling on the grassy bed. August was waning, and, in a way, I was pedaling away from my problems, even if just for a moment.
“Do you know why they drained the pond in the garden already? I don’t recall it ever getting drained so early.”
It was a woman, high-class in a way, speaking to her partner. I turned back around, swung my bag off my shoulder, and dumped it beside my bike. Both sat unchained, idly pressed to the floor. A few feet over, I wandered to one of the old wooden park benches. It basked in relative solitude, separated from the pond by the sidewalk and a parallel strip of cut grass. It was a painted bench, one that had clearly seen better days. The grain was thick and rubbery as if painted over continuously, year after year, without end. Sighing, I sat; I surveyed. She wasn’t lying; the pond was empty. It looked shallow, sad in a way, yet still inviting. In that sense, it was pitiful. It sank one, perhaps two feet deep. To the extent that a pond could, it seemed to frown; its muddied edges wilted, and its belly sank slightly into the ground. The closer I looked, and the more I stared, the more I believed the crater was oscillating the slightest fraction of an inch, up and down, up and down, up and down. It had a lively quality — an exhaling flow — like the odyssey of a sleeping beast — subtly kinetic — yet so still — yet so slow. After a few minutes of staring, I reclined, yanking my shirt from a handful of protruding splinters barely breaking the grain’s rubbery surface.
From my waist, I raised my Discman. A few days before, I had bought the new OutKast album — Aquemini. For those days, I couldn’t stop listening, and even then, I couldn’t stare at the pond in silence.
She was fine as fuck — I wanted to sex the ho up
She said, ‘Let's hit the parking lot so I can sick your duck’
My scalp felt irritated, pulsating even, so I shifted my headphones a good two inches back.
I said, ‘Cool, I really wanted to cut you but this’ll do
I gotta pick up my daughter, plus my baby mama beeped me, too.’
I removed my headphones. I didn’t mind the language; I knew it was a part of the shtick, but still, something felt unholy about it. Perhaps God actually hated swearing, and I was bound to burn in hell because I really liked OutKast. That thought raced through my mind almost as quickly as it appeared because I figured that if god hated swearing, he surely wouldn’t have granted me the ability to enjoy it.
What does sick your duck even mean? I leaned over to my bag, took my notebook out, and played around with the phrase.
Duck your sick…no.
Your sick duck…possible?
Duck sick your…definitely not.
It took me a few re-listens to realize I might’ve misunderstood the lyrics. A quick glance over the pond, now basking in the mid-afternoon sun, gave me the answer. It had nothing to do with a duck. The phrase was comically crude. I heard an excited Ms. Locax, “A purposeful spoonerism!” I turned — she wasn’t there. A wave of satisfaction washed over me as I connected the dots. Upon internalizing my mistake, though, I blushed and quietly put my notebook away. All the while, my mind drifted.
Why did they drain it?
Who is they?
I saw big, burly men coming at the crack of dawn to pump water out of the pond. The men drove big bureaucratic trucks, shining in a future-facing chrome paint job and glossed in oversized, boring blocks of blue Impact text posing as a logo for some state department. They skipped the parking lot and stopped directly on the grass, exiting the vehicle in a synchronized, orderly fashion. Their blue hazmat suits owned them: they were Jonah, and their suits were the whale. They split into pairs. Some went down to examine the pond, collecting samples in 50mL vials, while others unloaded a big tubular vacuum stretching 30 yards in length. Periodically, those by the pond returned with their samples and, walking backward, extended the tube in the pond’s direction.
After a while, they placed the tube in the pond. A few men stayed, using their weight to anchor the machine. Another man, 30 yards back, pulled a lever from the truck, not without resistance, and the mellow hum of the engine grew into a steady, powerful rhythm. Where would the water go? Dumped in the water supply? Reused somehow? Or did it join the city’s other waste, both intellectual and physical, lost and unattended in some superfluous holding tank, reeking of rot and neglect?
Something tapped my shoulder; I snapped out of it,
“Do you know why they drained the pond in the garden already?”
Slightly startled, I realized it was the woman from earlier,
“I’m not quite sure, to be honest.”
“So strange, isn’t it?”
She spoke to me like an adult; it was refreshing. Over the summer, I made a concerted effort to grow as much facial hair as possible — try to look a little older. My stubble was far from perfect, and some may contest it wasn’t stubble at all, but this woman either didn’t care or was too distracted by the pond to notice anything about me.
“I’ve lived here for 23 years now, and never — never — have I seen the pond this empty so early. It’s just such a sad sight.”
I tried mimicking her speech patterns,
“Dreadful, I tell you.”
“So, do you have any idea?”
“Truthfully, no, I know as much as you on this matter.”
Her partner lurked in her shadow and looked at me with a sort of scowl.
“You know, maybe it was a religious thing.”
“A religious thing?” she responded.
“Yeah, a religious thing.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know, a ritual of some kind.”
“Really?”
She was gullible at best.
“Yea — the blue suit group.”
“The blue suit group?”
“A cult that loves water, they go around the country looking for the aqueous messiah — they take bodies of water from locals for a “higher purpose.”
“You don’t say?”
“That’s what I heard.”
The woman looked at her partner in wondrous astonishment. She thanked me, bumped her partner’s shoulder, and walked away. I felt bad for deceiving, although I wasn’t lying. If I were lying, I would have to know the truth. I was more indifferent to how things were; the truth or falsity of my words were just kind of irrelevant to me. I would call it humbug — a way to fill the silence.
I looked over the pond again; it sat, slightly drier than before. The sun hung a little lower in the sky, casting an alluring, golden light on the scene. The long shadows of the trees stretched out across the grass, aiming for the drained pond like arrows toward a target. I became a little irritated by the imagery; it grew so redundant. So frustratingly unspecial, like the thousands of nature poems paraded for praise in the Paris Review, each presented as some special kind of artistic expression by Ms. Locax. I picked up my notebook again and started constructing a stanza. I wasn’t writing a nature poem; I was writing something else — something more exciting.
***
He sat, pencil in hand, imagining the water above the pond, suspended in an atmospheric emulsion. In the boy’s world, the droplets spun in concentric circles, contracting and expanding in calculated oscillation — a spherical ballet tied to an invisible conductor. The scene pulsed with an unseen energy, color, and sound, transforming the tiredness of it all into something extraordinarily complex and beautiful — at least for the boy. The pond, void of water, rang with an unseen melody, a sonata of silence, a dirge for a time that was. It sat — a lifeless, uninspired pit filled by the boy’s amorphous orchestration.
The boy, more distant than before, finished his stanza and finally got up from the bench. His words floated above him; they were separate, like balloons, lost, gone with the wind. He collected his items, equipped his backpack, and walked his bike to the road. His eye caught a telephone poll, maybe fifteen feet from his standing. He walked over and read the singular stapled pamphlet.
ATTENTION: MONDALE POND, DRAINED FOR WATER QUALITY MONITORING AND POND RESTORATION. TOXIC ALGAE HAS BEEN REMOVED, AND DUCKS SHUTTLED OFFSITE. PLEASE PARDON OUR APPEARANCE. SCHEDULED REPLENISHMENT IN EARLY MARCH.
THANK YOU,
DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION
The boy smirked. He paused for a moment and opened his bag. He ripped his stanza out and, grabbing a thumbtack from the pole, tacked his poem atop the pamphlet. Leaving, he listened to new lyrics ring like old bells; in the quaintest of ways, they sang to him:
My mind warps and bends, floats the wind count to ten.
He pedaled away, and the pond frowned, but this time, a little less alone.