John Adams: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Gracie had been sitting on the bank of what she considered her cove, a rocky crescent on the south side of the lake that no one else seemed to know or care about. It was too shady for sunbathers and devoid of the picnic tables and rope swings that drew vacationers like beacons during the tourist season. She’d been skipping stones, telling herself not to pick the scab on her knee, because she wanted to look good in the jean shorts she’d cut even shorter on her fourteenth birthday, and then doing it anyway, when she heard a splash. One, two, three humps breached the blue surface of the water, a glittering little mountain range, there and then gone, followed by the slap of—Gracie’s mind refused to accept it, and at the same time clamored—a tail.

Gracie scrabbled backward up the banks to the pines and dragged herself to her feet, heart jackrabbiting in her chest, waiting for the water to part again or for something huge and scaly to haul itself onto the sand, but nothing happened. Her mouth was salty with the taste of blood. She’d bitten her tongue. She spat once, leaped onto her bicycle, and pedaled as hard as she could down the bumpy dirt path to the smooth pavement of the main road, thighs burning as she hurtled through town.

It wasn’t much of a hurtle, because Little Spindle wasn’t much of a town. There was a mini-mart, a gas station with the town’s lone ATM, a veterinary clinic, a string of souvenir shops, and the old Rotary hall, which had become the public library after the library in Greater Spindle flooded ten years before. Little Spindle had never gotten the traffic or the clusters of condos and fancy homes that crowded around Greater Spindle, just a smattering of rental cottages and the Spindrift Inn. Despite the fact that the lake was nearly as big as Greater Spindle and surrounded by perfectly good land, there was something about Little Spindle Lake that put people off.

The lake looked pleasant enough from a distance, glimpsed through the pines in vibrant blue flashes, sunlight spiking off its surface in jewel-bright shards. But as you got closer you started to feel your spirits sink, and by the time you were at its shore, you felt positively mournful. You’d convince yourself to walk down to the beach anyway, maybe swing out on the old tire, but as you let go of the rope, you’d hang for the briefest second above the water and you’d know with absolute certainty that you’d made a horrible mistake, that once you vanished beneath the surface you would never be seen again, that the lake was not a lake but a mouth—hungry, blue, and sullen. Some people seemed impervious to the effects of Little Spindle, but others refused even to put a toe in the water.

The only place that did real business year-round was the Dairy Queen, despite the Stewart’s only a few miles away. But why Annalee had chosen to set up shop in Little Spindle instead of Greater Spindle was a mystery to everyone but her.

Gracie didn’t head straight for the DQ that day—not at first. In fact, she got all the way home, tossed her bike down in the yard, and had her hand on the screen door before she caught herself. Eric and her mom liked to spend Saturdays in the backyard, just lying next to each other on plastic lounge chairs, snoozing, hands clasped like a couple of otters. They both worked long hours at the hospital in Greater Spindle and hoarded sleep like it was a hobby.

Gracie hovered there at the door, hand outstretched. What could she really say to her mother? Her weary mother who never stopped looking worried, even in sleep? For a moment, at the edge of the lake, Gracie had been a kid again, but she was fourteen. She should know better.

She got back on her bike and pedaled slowly, meditatively, in no direction at all, belief seeping away as if the sun was sweating it out of her. What had she actually seen? A fish maybe? A few fish? But some deeper sense must have been guiding her, because when she got to the Dairy Queen she turned into the half-full parking lot.

Annalee Saperstein was at a table by the window, as she always was, doing her crossword, a Peanut Buster Parfait melting in front of her. Gracie mostly knew Annalee because she liked listening to the stories about her, and because her mom was always sending Gracie to ask Annalee over for dinner.

“She’s old and alone,” Gracie’s mother would say.

“She seems to like it.”

Her mom would wave her finger in the air like she was conducting an invisible orchestra. “No one likes being alone.”

Gracie tried not to roll her eyes. She tried.

Now she slid into the hard red seat across from Annalee and said, “Do you know anything about Idgy Pidgy?”

“Good afternoon to you too,” Annalee grumped, without looking up from her crossword.

“Sorry,” Gracie said. She thought of explaining that she’d had a strange start to her day, but instead opted for “How are you?”

“Not dead yet. It would kill you to use a comb?”

“No point.” Gracie tried to rope her slick black hair back into its ponytail. “My hair doesn’t take well to instruction.” She waited, then said, “So… the monster in the lake?”

She knew she wasn’t the first person to claim she’d seen something in the waters of Little Spindle. There had been a bunch of sightings in the sixties and seventies, though Gracie’s mom claimed that was because everyone was on drugs. The town council had even tried to turn it into a tourist draw by dubbing it the Idgy Pidgy—“Little Spindle’s Little Monster”—and painting the image of a friendly-looking sea serpent with googly eyes on the WELCOME TO LITTLE SPINDLE sign. It hadn’t caught on, but you could still see its outline on the sign, and a few winters back someone had spray-painted a huge phallus onto it. For the three days it took the town council to notice and get someone to paint over it, the sign looked like the Idgy Pidgy was trying to have sex with the E at the end of LITTLE SPINDLE.

“You mean like Loch Ness?” Annalee asked, glancing up through her thick glasses. “You got a sunburn.”

Gracie shrugged. She was always getting a sunburn, getting over a sunburn, or about to get a sunburn. “I mean like our lake monster.” It hadn’t been like Loch Ness. The shape had been completely different. Kind of like the goofy serpent on the town sign, actually.

“Ask that kid.”

“Which kid?”

“I don’t know his name. Summer kid. Comes in here every day at four for a cherry dip.”

Gracie gagged. “Cherry dip is vile.”

Annalee jabbed her pen at Gracie. “Cherry dip sells cones.”

“What does he look like?”

“Skinny. Big purple backpack. White hair.”

Gracie slid down in the booth, body going limp with disappointment. “Eli?”

Gracie knew most of the summer kids who had been coming to Little Spindle for a while. They pretty much kept to themselves. Their parents invited each other to barbecues, and they moved in rowdy cliques on their dirt bikes, taking over the lakes, making lines at Rottie’s Red Hot and the DQ, coming into Youvenirs right before Labor Day to buy a hat or a key chain. But Eli was always on his own. His family’s rental had to be somewhere near the north side of the lake, because every May he’d show up walking south on the main road, wearing too-big madras shorts and lugging a purple backpack. He’d slap his way to the library in a pair of faded Vans and spend the entire afternoon there by himself, then pick up his big backpack and trundle back home like some kind of weird blond pillbug, but not before he stopped at the DQ—apparently to order a cherry dip.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Annalee.

It was too hard to explain. Gracie shrugged. “He’s a little bit the worst.”

“The cherry dip of humans?”

Gracie laughed, then felt bad for laughing when Annalee peered at her over those thick plastic frames and said, “Because you’re the town sweetheart? You could use some more friends.”