The Blooming Pond

The wanderer watches as the first drake plunges her head into the water. The little pond is only just deep enough to submerge her wedge-shaped face. She emerges with a mask of mud, yellow eyes blinking past the sludge, the scales of her dewlap already fluffed up from the moisture. 

With a chirp, she rushes the rest of the way in: she rolls to wet her body, her flapping wings spray the rest of the flock with fat droplets of dirt. 

So she blooms from drake to bearer. As the scales along her face curl up like the petals of a orchid, so do the scales along the rest of her body, lifting up in bristles and curves, revealing the pearlescent skin beneath momentarily before she rolls again and coats those hidden parts of herself with another layer of grime. She looks twice as big now. Her coils take up every inch of the pond. She’s on her back, head buried (there is no use for it now, her eyes are unseeing, she is possessed by the water), belly up in a smooth arch, wings outstretched as mud laps at the wanderer’s claws.

Once she drags herself out of the pond, the next drake takes her place. Only some are meant to be bearers, so the wanderer has been told, and they often return to the same mates year after year. But sometimes, a bearer may not bloom as she did in other seasons. Sometimes, a hunter-drake or a nester-drake decades old may bloom for the first time. 

The wanderer lies on its belly as it watches. The red-eyed drake stands above it, his weight a comfort against its back. The day that the wanderer was introduced to the flock, he was the first to feed it, straight from his crop. The wanderer had been sprayed with the flock’s scent to ease the transition, but the smell was soon replaced by red-eye’s. They feel that they have known each other since their conceptions. In its earliest memories, the wanderer finds the limnic echoes of the water—as it floated, curled up and blind—which are echoed now in the red-eyed one’s chest when he is asleep. There is a whole lake inside of you, the wanderer thinks.

Here, the flock has returned to the place of its hatching, but the wanderer was created elsewhere. It only knows the smell of its bearer because it was the smell of its amnion. 

It remembers when a tag was clipped to its ear; it remembers when it was plucked from its metal-walled cage and placed on a bed of sand. Rolling currents stretched from its feet to the sky, where only the clouds stopped the lake—its lake—from flying away. One day you will be gone from us, said the nudging of those hands which once held the wanderer in their fleshy palms, you will return to their hatching place and swim as they do.

It had not been told that there would be no lake.

Throat quivering, their newest bearer recites a rising chant. The sound isn’t quite right. The wanderer has heard this song once before, from the confines of its egg. Each cry bounced off the surface of the lake to the shores and back again. There, a flock of bearers swam together and sang together, their intertwined silhouettes thrown against the wanderer’s shell by the blazing sun.

Here, the forest swallows each bearer up one by one, chants and all. The flock repeats her half-formed praises; they do so joyfully from beneath the shadows of bare, gnarled trees.

Feet, paws, and wheels churned the underbrush into mud long before their arrival, and through the threadbare wilderness, the wanderer can see on and on: to the city, to the mountains, to the horizon. What a long journey it had been to this place where even rats refuse to run and the air smells like petrol. Last night, the wanderer troweled its snout through the earth, pulling roots out by the teeth until its red-eyed hunter returned from the darkness with a bird in his mouth, its feathers so white that it glowed.

With each new bearer, the pond spreads thin. Soon there isn’t a pond at all, but a pit of furrowed mud. Of tails and wings knotted together. In the tattered privacy of the woods, the first bearers place their eggs precariously along the edges of leaves or cradled in tree roots. 

Won’t they dry out? Won’t the little white birds tear them apart? 

Last spring, only three hatchlings returned to the flock, and the mud had marked them too, their faces painted like their bearers are now. The wanderer sinks deeper into the ground and wraps its tail around its feet.

The red-eyed one nudges the wanderer’s cheek and looks toward the puddles. Should the wanderer bloom? It has a hunter’s frills and a hunter’s horns, although they are quite small, but even hunters sometimes bloom. It should try, but it won’t. It rolls onto its back with an exhale, so still that it might as well be dead. The red-eyed one should leave it alone now. He should find a bearer. He is young and strong, though the journey has made him ribby. His scales are mottled blue and red like the sky in the winter and he has a whole lake inside of him.

But he stays. Together they peer out at the flock, whose cries have died down to whispers. The flock is tails woven together in braids and masks made of hardened dirt and eyes glittering distantly like stars. They preen their eggs with lashing tongues. They have flower faces. They don’t know.

Where is the lake? the wanderer asks its red-eyed hunter.

There is no lake, the hunter answers. The lake is only a nester’s story. An old, old story.

But the wanderer has seen it, once, somewhere far away.

© 2024 Lowry Poletti

About the Author

Lowry Poletti is a Black author, artist, and veterinary student from New Jersey. When they aren’t writing about monsters and the people who love them, they can be found wrist deep in a formalin-fixed lab specimen. Their other pieces appear in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and Lightspeed Magazine. You can find them on Twitter as @LowryFerretly or at their website: lowrypoletti.wordpress.com