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Creek Monsters

A flash fiction

By Margery P BaynePublished 2 years ago 4 min read
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Creek Monsters
Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

I know that monsters exist. I saw one myself once. When I was eleven years old, a monster pushed my best friend under the local creek and drowned her.

The water was unusually high that day because of a bunch of early summer rainstorms. Usually, our feet would dangle over the surface of the water where we sat at the end of the pier. This day we were into our ankles, and that wasn’t just because we had both stretched taller the past year. Well, I had stretched a lot taller. Emma had managed the luck of the draw and managed to stretch a lot prettier too. Where I was getting gangly and acme, she was getting boobs.

Emma kicked a leg out of the water, toes pointed like a ballerina. “Benji called my house yesterday,” she said.

“For what?” I hadn’t seen or heard from my crush since summer vacation had started.

“You know his birthday is over the summer...”

She kicked her other foot. A side-splash plopped on the skirt of my sundress, molding the fabric to my thigh.

“July 8th.”

Water dripped from the tips of Emma’s extended toes, forming ringlets on top of the creek.

“He invited me to his party. It’s this afternoon.”

“He didn’t invite me.”

Emma rolled her eyes. They were baby blue. “Have you ever even talked to him?”

Talk to him? That was an absurd notion for an eleven-year-old. Crushes were not dealt with by direct confrontation. They were handled with longing stares, passed notes, and communications sent through various trusted third parties. Usually, best friends asking the object of affection’s best friend if who liked whomever else back.

“I’ve talked to him! Last April, I lent him my eraser --”

“You need to get over the eraser. You lend me pencils all the time.” Emma leaned back on the pier, head arched toward the sky. She looked sun-blessed.

It was a nice day. The breeze was mild. Nothing seemed off.

By Anna Claire Schellenberg on Unsplash

Then, like a strike of lightning, Emma said, “Maybe I like him too.”

“What?” I asked, not because I hadn’t heard right. Because I hoped I hadn’t heard right.

“Benji. I like him too.”

“Like-like?”

Emma nodded. A cloud moved over the sun.

“But he’s my crush.” And he may have not liked me back, yet, but it was an unspoken rule as true as crush negotiations: you didn’t crush on your best friend’s crush.

“You never even talk to him.”

“I do!”

Despite any louder protests, the truth fluttered in my heart anyway. Emma had been invited to Benji’s birthday party and I had not.

“I’m just trying to be fair,” Emma said. “Telling you.”

There was nothing fair about it. Emma wasn’t just prettier than me, she was the prettiest girl in class. If she liked Benji, she would win.

Being her best friend had always been a balance of good and bad. She always invited me along to the cool things she did, but next to her, I was always overlooked.

“Did you ask if I could come to the party too?”

Emma swirled her legs in the water. “I can’t keep asking to bring you to things. We’re going to be in middle school soon.”

I didn’t look at her because I didn’t want her to look at me back and notice that I was close to crying. No good being a crybaby when you were going to be in middle school soon.

Sitting very still, I felt the water shift around my feet with a life other than the current.

“Sunfish,” I announced because that was what I was sure the little bumps were.

Emma leaned forward to look into the murky brown water. An eager nature-lover, she wasn’t a prissy girl. We had been hoping to spot fish other than minnows in the high tide but hadn’t had a speck of luck that morning.

That’s when the monster's arm reached up. It grabbed her by the back of the neck and pushed her head under the water. The abnormally high tide made it easy. Not such a long distance between the pier and the water.

Maybe the monster didn’t mean to kill her. Maybe it meant to just scare her. Maybe it wanted to mess up her perfect ponytail and sundress. Maybe it wanted to make her look less pretty for at least a little while. For at least this afternoon.

When Emma’s body went limp, the monster let go. Her body slumped off the pier and into the creek.

They ended up finding her body a half a mile down current. Accidental drowning the police ruled, but I know the truth.

I know that monsters exist.

Horror
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About the Creator

Margery P Bayne

Margery Bayne is a librarian by day and a writer by night from Baltimore, Maryland -- a published short story writer and an aspiring novelist. More about her and her writing can be found at www.margerybayne.com and on Medium @margerybayne.

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