Thursday, May 21, 2020

One Word Writing Prompt: Resurface

From time to time, a dead body washes up on the shore of Lake Waterton. Deep in the fields and forests, it's a scenic dumping ground for the mobs of surrounding cities. They'll make the hour-long drive out to the lake with a body or two in the trunk, hoping that no one will notice that they are putting things into the water instead of taking things out like the local fishermen. They think the lake will hide the bodies for a long time or that the wildlife will destroy all the evidence. But sooner or later, the lake spits out what has gone in.

So the criminals got clever. They started chaining the corpses' feet to blocks of cement. Cement doesn't float, so the bodies won't either. But the lake has outwitted them. As the bodies decompose, the ligaments in the ankle break and the feet stay at the bottom while the rest of the bodies wash ashore.

So the criminals got cleverer. They wrapped the bodies with netting and chained the netting to the cement blocks, and for several months, no new bodies appeared on the beaches. But one cannot defeat Lake Waterton. She knows what she does not want. It stopped raining. The mountain rivers that usually flowed into the lake stopped running. The waterline began to recede. And then one day, a fisherman ventured onto the dwindling lake and saw dozens of people bobbing in the water's surface, caught in fishing net.

The water always wins.

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