The Girl in the Pond

There is a pond in the old pear orchard. Every year, it freezes over, and kids love to skate on it, making spirals and figure eights until the cold reaches through their leather skates and their thick wool socks and reaches their tiny toes, and tells them it’s time or hot cocoa cinnamon cookies.

Parents always tell their kids to be careful on the pond. Story goes that year ago, a girl fell through the pond and died, and now she haunts it. The story changes depending on who tells it. Sometimes it was 20 year ago. Sometimes 100. Sometimes she was skating on the ice and hit a thin spot. Sometimes she was crossing the pond to get medicine. But it’s always a girl, and she always falls in, and she always dies. Isn’t that the crux of stories like this? Keep some points consistent, but change certain other points to fit the listener? Children must learn to be careful. The veracity of the story is unimportant as long as the lesson gets through.

Without the help of someone else, it is nearly impossible to get out of a frozen lake if you fall through. Waterlogged clothing weighs the person down. The ice on the surface of the lake is impossible to find handhold on, and without that, one cannot hoist themselves out. They sink below the surface of the lake, overtaken by the cold. The small comfort is that hypothermia is a gentle way to go, ushering you sweetly into sleep and then…nothing.

The thing is, the story of the girl falling through the ice is true. The details aren’t really important. She was alone when the ice cracked, a sharp crack, and the lake swallowed her. They found her in the spring after the thaw, cold and white as a hore frost, but so beautiful and serene, an ice princess.

People are mindful on the ice; it is the nature of living in lands prone to freeze. They know to respect, to take care. But sometimes, people get lazy. They get complacent. So the girl from the lake has to take someone.

The man was drunk, and had no business being out in the pear orchard. He was probably lost, looking for a place to lay his head. Perhaps he did not know the lake was there at all, since a snow had fallen and disguised the icy lake as merely frozen ground. It was far to cold for fireflies. February is not firefly season. But green lights danced over the lake, beckoning him forward. He stumbled onto the icy, sliding forward as he lost his footing. He hit the ice with a heavy thump. The ice cracked loudly, like a shot in the cold stillness of the night. The green lights swarmed around the man, light and friendly The man scrambled to get up, but between his drunken state and the lack of footing, he merely slid on his hands and knees.

And suddenly, the crack split open, and his eyes grew wide as he hit the cold water. There was nothing he could do. The girl in the lake had picked him. The green lights had invited him. He could not fight. He grew cold and sleepy, his clothes pulled him down. The girl in the lake claimed another.

No one knows why she does it. Perhaps she is trying to hold her loneliness at bay. Perhaps she wants to be sure people remember that the lake is dangerous. No one knows why ghosts do what they do. But if you are at the pond, and you see the green lights, high tail it out of there, or perhaps you will become companion of the girl in the pond.