In the old days, my grandfather told me it used to just be once every six years. The town would go down to the lake on the last Sunday of the summer, dressed in white or the closest you could get, everyone lining up along the banks to wash their hands clean in the water. And then a name would be drawn. Somebody’s daughter. Sister. Lover. Cousin. A girl next door, a girl you had grown up with. Someone with dreams about seeing the world outside the state lines, someone with favorite songs and best friends and promises to keep. The girl would walk into the lake and would be held by her mama for the last time, the woman she was grown from dipping her low into the water so she shone in the sunlight, skin dripping. She’d smile for her daddy, despite the tears he’d catch with his hands, so he’d remember her well. Then she would start to swim, out into the middle of the water until she reached the other side, the one always lost in the mists even in deep summer. Nobody had even seen the other side, even from the boats. It was something you stayed away from, the current always tugging you back, a warning. And she’d never be seen again.
The thing was, it wasn’t the old days anymore. Granny told me things started going wrong in the gaps between those six years, just after my parents and uncles and aunts had graduated high school. Lambs being born with the skin around their eyes green, blind from the moment they came into the world. Dogs howling for days on end until their lungs collapsed and they died from exhaustion. People waking up with dead moths covering the floors of their hallways, piled so deep you couldn’t see the carpet beneath them. At first, people just came to accept that something in the trees was changing and for whatever reason was throwing things a little off balance. Then the rains stopped. People began to worry, but put it down to a dry spell and nothing more, despite the fact that the rain came every October without fail, and had done so since people first lived here back in the days of candlelight and wagons, before the trees were tamed.
Then the cows started milking blood, and the dirt started turning black, swallowing anything planted. And then the babies started being born without their legs, or their arms or their eyes. My uncle Jonah was born legless, momma’s youngest brother. Grandfather says it didn’t matter because he could drink like a man standing up. I liked Jonah best. He was always loud, laughing and cracking jokes that had everyone clutching their sides like their ribs were about to spill their organs on the floor. He had a voice like Johnny Cash and you could tell Grandfather was proud when he sang along with his guitar, because when Jonah sang everyone would forget about his legs a while. But he could be quiet too, could convince birds down from the trees to eat out of his hand. Sometimes I’d catch him looking real sad though, watching me and my cousins playing tag, or watching his brother’s dance with their wives.
So Granny said that six years became four years and it was okay the first time. But then the lake started to dry up. And things started washing up on the shore, baby bones and drowned rabbits with too many eyes. Deer started getting bloodthirsty, running out of the woods with their eyes white and teeth sharp, stealing chickens. People had to stop fishing out on the water because when they would drag up their nets they would be full of snakes. They would toss them back, but a few always made it to shore. One of them found their way into church and bit the preacher right on the wrist. The preacher bashed its head in with his bible. Old folks started sleepwalking at night, lining up on the edge of the lake and waking in the morning with no memory of walking there barefoot, feet all cut up and muddy.
So four years became two years and it was okay the first time too. But people started getting scared to bring their babies into this world and so parents stopped having kids. People started seeing things in the mist. Then the dreams started. My best friend Tommy’s dad was one of those that had the dreams. I went with him to the cemetery a couple of times to visit when we were kids. Tommy always brought one of his power rangers or a race car to leave on top of the grave in case his daddy got bored in heaven, even though there wasn’t actually a body down in the ground. Tommy said he didn’t know what the dreams were about and that his momma wouldn’t tell him. Granny wouldn’t tell me either but she said the dreams made thirty people real sad, and that they couldn’t stop feeling sad, so they all swam into the lake one day and they didn’t stop until they reached the bottom.
So two years became once a year. And the rains came back, and people started sleeping better, and people started fishing on the lake again. And the flowers grew a little brighter and the air a little warmer, and the high school football team suddenly won every game. The mini-mart that had been on the edge of closing down suddenly sold fruit so good people would drive in from towns over to buy it, cherries like drips of blood, peaches soft enough to be skin and everywhere over town the apple trees heaved with offerings. And yet, families lived in constant fear of having a daughter, like all of them were walking around with hunting knives twist deep in their spines that they just had to bear. Little girls grew up walking around with grief so heavy it would break their back if they had understood what was coming for them when they grew up.