Burning Foxglove It was a winter just like any other winter. Cold, with rain that fell during the day and congealed overnight, leaving sheets of ice that never seemed to melt. The grass crunched underfoot, and the wind burned any bits of exposed skin—noses, ears, fingertips. Years later, her father would try and tell her that it had been an especially vicious winter, that the growth of the icicles and the length of the frost should have been a warning of things to come. But Emmaline would always remember. It had been an ordinary winter. Because, yes, the pond had been frozen. But not all the way. Emmaline remembered sitting at the edge of the pond with Peter, the two of them taking turns cracking holes in the thin ice. They would stab a stick, a stone, a boot heel through the quarter-inch ice and stir the black, still water underneath. The pond appeared to them to be sleeping, and their games only served to barely prick the slumbering beast. Half an hour later, the gashes in the surface would be smoothed back over, leaving a new, wet patch of ice like a still-oozing scab on the surface of the pond. The first few times it happened, Peter would gasp in wonder at this glassy beauty, tearing off his gloves to run his fingertips over the rugged, old ice and then the perfect, new patches. “Em, look!” he said. “I wish we could tear a hole through the whole pond so everything could be pretty like this.” He spread his arms out as wide as he could, his small hands red from the cold. “Maybe, if the ice was clear, we could see if there are any fish at the bottom.” “Or any monsters,” Emmaline said. She kept her hand on the ice but watched him out of the corner of her eye to see if he would believe her. “You’re right,” Peter said gravely. “The fish are sleeping, but monsters never sleep.” He always spoke of the pond with a kind of reverence, a respect for the largest body of water he had seen. He called it a lake, a pond, a river, and when he was younger, an ocean. They were all the same to him, encompassed by the green, reedy water that sucked at muddy shores and consumed their waking hours. The pond was easily the most interesting part of their backyard and certainly more interesting than their house, a slapdash cottage with two bedrooms, half a porch, and a screen door with a broken latch that swung back and forth, banging in the wind. It was easy to imagine the house was haunted; why shouldn’t the pond have a monster too? “Yes,” Emmaline said. “They stay awake. All the time. They swim and they swim, around in circles looking for their next meal.” She bared her teeth and snapped them, as if she was swallowing a minnow. Peter shrieked and laughed.
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