Drone in Deepwater

1894

In Deepwater, the night was reserved for idle contemplation. While the frogs croaked and the crickets chittered and the thick, dark water lapped against the reeds, Sadie lit a candle and her husband, Frank, smoked a pipe.

The air smelled strong and heavy, like damp warmth and cigar and sulphur. Frank leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes – speaking only in grunts and raised eyebrows, as Sadie fussed over the dishes. “Contemplation, Sadie…” he’d say, gravelly voice muffled around the pipe. Thick with smoke (and “tuberculosis, probably! You’re lookin’ sick as ol’ Parish!” Sadie liked to fret). “Contemplation.”

“You learn one fancy word…” Sadie would grumble in response.

That night, Frank said nothing, and let Sadie’s mutterings melt into the music of the swamp. The wood panels of their shack creaked beneath her feet, the candle cast an elongating shadow against the wall, like a third presence, flickering, stretching, shrinking. Sadie’s thick, blonde braid thudded against her back, slid toward her shoulder, fell down her front, and was sent with another thud against her back. A fourth presence.

“I’m takin’ out the greywater,” she said

Frank grunted.

In Deepwater, the rickety shacks were raised up on the banks, connected by wooden bridges and docks, an interconnected web of candlelit windows and murmuring voices and dreamcatchers hanging from the doorways. The trees drooped low over the swamp, black against the red sunset settling onto the horizon. Smoke from the city – a small horse-ride from Deepwater, where the trees opened up and the mud turned to dirt – rose up into the stars. Sadie shuffled over to the edge of the dock, greywater sloshing in her bucket. She could hear Thomas and Marie Huxley arguing in the shack beside her own; Marie’s voice carrying over with the mosquitos. “…there’s enough left on your plate to feed a gator!”

In Deepwater, you are a skinned animal; everything is exposed. From your drawers, hung over the dock railings to dry, to your petty, martial squabbles. Thomas and Marie were known for them, though they had the strongest marriage Sadie knew, beside her own, of course. But, then, the Huxley’s were held in a soft spot in her heart, being another young married couple in a population of deeply lined faces and shawl-clutching widows, so perhaps few others would agree.

Sadie tipped the greywater into the swamp, then straightened to swipe away the hair clamped against her forehead. Swamp air was as wet as the water, and reeked with the putrid stench of it. City folk huffed and hawed and pinched their noses when passing through, but Sadie was born in Deepwater, the smell was her home.

“…I’ll feed you and your dinner to a gator, then! Don’t mess me about, Thomas!”

One thing you learned about living in Deepwater was to listen to it. Sadie tuned the Huxley’s out, and focused on the night-sounds around her. The crackling of the cicadas, like sizzling heat, the gentle thud of their boat bobbing against the docks, insects, frogs, gators slicing through the water, leaving it rippling.

And something else.

A strange whirring. Like sharp, whipping wind. But the night, and the glossy black water, was still.

It was coming from above her. A bird, swooping from the city smoke, a glint of sun from between drooping leaves. The crest of the moon. And there…something.

At first, Sadie thought it was a large black bird. Flying toward her. But it had no wings, and the shape of its body was wrong. It looked, oddly, like a giant spider, flying, but with only four appendages. Each grasping what appeared to be a brown box.

Around it’s body radiated pinpricks of white and red light.

A fear so brutal that it trapped her own breath in her lungs overtook her; Sadie’s mind couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. For a moment, she felt she went blind.

And then: “Fr…Frank.”

She was not loud, when she said his name. In fact, she made hardly any sound at all. But Frank knew, too, to listen to the swamp. And he was there, brandishing a rifle, joining her at the dock, in the jump of her heart.

“You alright?” Sadie couldn’t respond, but he could see she was uninjured. “Gator?”

She shook her head and raised, trembling, a hand toward the sky.

Frank was a large man, bearded, broad-shouldered. His hands were calloused, his eyes dark and unfriendly, his face stoic and unmoving. In all her years of knowing him, Sadie had never seen him cry, she had hardly seen him smile – except for in their most private moments – and not once had she ever seen him look the way he did in that moment, as his eyes found the strange object in the sky. Scared.

“What in the damn hell?”

“Shoot it!” Sadie cried, finding herself. Then she made the sign of the cross, closed her eyes, and prayed.

With the first rattling gunshot, came the sound of feet smacking the dock, doors wrenching open, shouts, birds screeching and fluttering up toward the moon.

More men brought rifles. As did Marie Huxley, who wrestled her way through the growing crowd and found herself next to Frank and Sadie, her handsome face set in fierce determination.

She got the first hit, and the box fell from the object’s grip and landed down at the other end of the docks - Arthur Clifton and Harry Buford ran after it – but it was Frank who brought it down. The crowd scattered as it careened toward them, and landed right by Frank and Sadie’s front door.

*

“Who in the damn hell knows what those folks are doing out in the city,” growled Frank, after he and Harry Buford had stepped up to poke the smoking object with the butts of their rifles.

Everyone else had shrunk back at the sight of it – there was something unnatural…otherworldly…about its sleekness, the strange metallic replication of limbs, the small rotary fans attached to its back, still spinning idly. Marie Huxley knelt over the box, thin and wiry Thomas Huxley peering over her shoulder. It looked to be a simple cardboard box, but with stark blue stripes.

“There’s writing on here,” said Marie. She looked at them with hard eyes beneath an array of soft, fallen curls. Nobody there could read. “Somebody get the Reverend.” Harry Buford ran off to fetch him.

They waited beneath the darkening sky. Almost all the light was gone, a few women shuffled off to find lanterns. Slowly, as the flickering firelight fell over the wood, whispers began to spread: it must be from the city…there is no way a man made that!...it is a monster…it is a creature from hell…

Behind all the noise, Sadie strained to find those sounds from the swamp, the cicadas, the swimming gators. But everything had gone silent. The swamp held its breath, and so did she.

The Reverend arrived with his old, haggard face lit by candlelight. “Where is it,” he snapped, hobbling, a Bible tucked under his armpit.

His face went slack as Frank stepped aside, revealing the strange object.

“Here, Reverend,” said Marie, holding out the box. “There is something written on it.”

“Ye...yes,” says the Reverend, appearing glad to look at something else. His glasses slid down his damp nose. “Let’s see here…it says…Amazon. There, in the bold letters. Amazon…Prime Air.”

“Wha’s tha?” asked Billy Taylor from beside Sadie. He reeked of whiskey.

“Well,” said the Reverend. “I think it’s has something to do with the Greeks.” The crowd began to murmur. “A myth, if I recall. The Amazons.”

“The wha?” asked Billy.

“Those words are nonsensical together. Well – look, there’s something else here.” He peered down closer at the box – it was shaking, slightly, in Marie’s grip. “Some of it got wet, I can’t read it, but…there’s a name…”

He looked up, slowly.

“Sadie Jones.”

Sadie felt as though all her blood had run out into the bayou.

“What? Whaddya mean it says Sadie?” asked Frank, gruffly. “It’s gotta be something else.”

“That’s what it says,” said the Reverend.

“She was the first one to see it!” shouted someone from the crowd. The whole swamp was tilting sideways; Sadie couldn’t tell who was who.

“And it landed right in front of her door!”

“Now hol’ on,” said Frank. “Reverend, look at this thing. There’s no way in hell Sadie had anything to do with this. This is the work of them city folk, and you know it.”

“City folk?” repeated the Reverend. “Mr. Jones, surely you don’t think any man could make something like that? That is far beyond any sort of technology we’ve ever seen…”

“Well, then sure as hell no woman could have made it,” said Frank.

“Perhaps no regular woman…”

Marie gasped, and snatched the box back toward her chest. “Reverend, what are you sayin’?”

“I think you know plenty well…”

“Witch!” someone cried.

“She’s possessed by the devil!” cried another. A fever spread, quickly, and Sadie was grabbed, yanked. Frank yelled, struggling against a group of men to reach her. Marie Huxley pointed her rifle at Billy, but no one would dare shoot. Not in such a cluster like this. From over Billy’s shoulder, as she was tackled, Sadie thought she caught the glimpse of two dark, glinting eyes watching her from the amongst the moss in the water. And she could not help but think that she’d rather take her chances in there, with the gator.

*

By the time Sadie had been tied up on a stiff, wooden chair in her own shack, the people of Deepwater had decided that the flying object was a messenger from Hell, and it was delivering her a weapon. Marie Huxley was declared a likely accomplice, and her and Thomas were dragged away, to their own shack, with Marie’s shouts trailing after them. “Hands off me! And my husband! Where do you think you’re grabbin’, Billy?!”

Frank had been overpowered, and struck in the head with the butt of a rifle. It was the sight of him, crumpled on his chair, face drooped in the flickering light, that brought Sadie’s voice back to her.

“…I had nothin’ to do with it! I didn’t ask for no delivery! Please! The devil has not possessed me! I was simply takin’ out the greywater! Is Frank okay? Please, someone check on him! He hasn’t been well!”

Never had her squat little home been so full. The thick warmth of the swamp air felt impossibly dense with the amount of sweaty bodies, swinging oil lanterns, cramped together. Each breath felt like sucking swamp mud through a straw. The Reverend licked a bead of sweat from above his lip.

“I always suspected…” he said. “You and that Huxley woman – ”

“Please! I’m a God-fearing woman! A good, honest wife! Frank? Frank, wake up!”

“She’s hysterical. We’ll need to exorcise her,” said the Reverend, to Harry Buford who was stationed by his side, rifle in hand.

“Should we open the box, first? Maybe we can get some answers while she’s still got the Devil in her,” Harry Buford suggested.

“It could be very dangerous,” mused the Reverend. They were all under-lit, candles and lamps held at waist height. It threw their shadows up along the walls, stretching toward the ceiling. Closing in around her.

Sadie closed her eyes, sobbed. There was nothing for them to expel. What would happen, then? Would they declare her a hopeless case? Would they shoot her? Burn her? Throw her to the waters?

“Silence, woman!” snapped the Reverend; Sadie hadn’t realised she had been babbling feverishly. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he had stepped toward her, and jolted as he placed a cold, clammy hand to her forehead. “All powerful God,” he began, “give me constant faith and power so that, with the power of Your holy strength, I can attack this evil spirit – ”

“Please! It had nothin’ to do with me!”

“Mr Buford!” called the Reverend, and Harry stepped up beside him, holding out the blue and brown box, which had now been cracked open. “Tell us, woman! Demon! What is in this box?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Sadie crowed.

The Reverend snatched the box from Harry Buford and held it upside down, and the contents spilled out like a gutted animal’s insides. There were gasps, mutters, the floorboards groaned under all the feet stepping closer. What appeared to be white beans spilled from the box, so light they almost floated down to the floor. A slightly heavier object fell onto Sadie’s lap.

“There! The weapon!” Harry Buford snatched it from Sadie’s lap. His face fell, eyebrows dropping low over his eyes, as he lifted his lantern, and held the object up to the light. “What is it, Reverend?”

The Reverend held the same fallen expression.

“Explain the meaning of this,” he snapped at Sadie, holding it out to her.

It was roughly the shape and size of a small book, though there were no pages. On the front was a startling vibrant picture; Sadie had to squint through her tears to decipher the shapes and colours of it. There were drawings of trees, almost how a child would draw them. And odd, very round looking creatures.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “What does it say?”

The Reverend read through the bottom of his glasses: “Animal Crossing.”

Silence. Then, “she’s going to curse our animals!” Angered cries rang out from the crowd. Sadie plead out to them, struggling against her restraints. The Reverend and Harry Buford exchanged a glance, and Harry placed his oil lamp down by his feet, fixing the rifle strapped over his shoulder.

Sadie clamped her eyes shut.

A gunshot pierced the night.

Everything shattered, fell, into silence. Sadie looked out at the crowd but no one had been struck. It had come from the Huxley’s shack.

“Go,” said Harry Buford to Arthur Clifton, who nodded and led a small group of men out to the Huxleys’ to investigate. The shack seemed to expand without their presence, even though, without their lamps, the shadows fell in. In the new space, Sadie could think. Thank you for your blessing, Marie. She began to smile.

“What is it, woman?” asked the Reverend, aghast.

“Men,” Sadie said, and laughed. “You’ll never understand it, never stop it. You, Frank. Try as you may.”

“What’s she meanin?” asked Harry Buford.

“Wake Frank,” said the Reverend, without leaving Sadie’s eye. She could see his thoughts moving like the light striking his glasses. “He’ll give us answers.”

“No – ” Sadie began. John Reeds, who was closest, rolled up his sleeves, and slapped Frank – who had remained slumped and unconscious throughout the whole ordeal – across the face.

With everyone distracted, Sadie lurched forwards and kicked the oil lantern by Harry’s feet with all her might. Her chair tipped over and she hit the floor. The lantern flew halfway across the room, smashed, and caught on the night dress of Rosemary Clifton. Rosemary shrieked. The flames climbed her leg, licked along the oil spilt on the floor. Feet stamped to put it out. The Reverend swore under his breath and began shouldering his way to the door.

The fire spread. Someone shouted, “leave the witch to burn!”

And in the stampede of feet, in the sweltering heat, Sadie called out to Frank, hoping, if nothing else, he’d be able to save himself. She could not see if he had awoken.

And against the burning floorboards, Sadie prayed. For Frank, for Marie and Thomas Huxley, for herself. The heat pressed against her face, so hot it was nearly cold.

And, in the fire, Sadie closed her eyes, and imagined that the wavering air was rippling water, and she was drowning, immersed by her swamp.

*

2025

Your parcel from Amazon is coming today!

Sadie Jones read over the text again, then glanced out at the swelling storm clouds. The morning had been warm, full sun. But it had been growing darker, heavier since they’d hit noon. She could feel the press of it, the moisture in the warm air, taste the sting of metal. Either someone was trying to start an old engine a few blocks away, or she could hear thunder.

“Do you think it’ll be delayed?” she asked her roommate, Ava, from the other side of the couch. “My package?” Ava craned her neck to glance out the window behind them, then stuck her nose back to her phone with a shrug.

“Isn’t it coming by drone? It’ll probably be here any minute now. What was it again? Games?”

“Animal Crossing,” said Sadie. “The original one.”

“Oh, nice.”

A flash, from the corner of her eye. Thunder whip-cracked, then rumbled, above them, so close the window-glass rattled in their panes.

The two girls jolted. “Whoa – ”

Rain fell, all at once, as if someone had tipped over a bucket of water in the sky.

“Well, shit,” Ava said, with a snort. “Maybe it will be delayed.”

Sadie groaned. “It’s probably flying out in that right now.”

The sky had gone dark; lightning lit it with shocking shards of white.

“That drone’ll be struck right out of the sky,” Ava said.

“It’ll be struck right into another dimension,” Sadie grumbled.

Ava laughed.