Abigail Lee Burning Foxglove

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.

“What do you think they look like?” she asked.

“Big,” he said immediately. “Huge—with sharp spikes on top of their heads, and down the sides. And a fat tail, like a whale. Their front legs have claws for catching things, but their back legs are smooth, so they can be sneaky quiet.”

“Scales or skin?” “Probably skin—mud would be gross on scales.” “What color?”

“Well, you can’t really see, cause it’s dark. But probably gray. Or brown. A camouflage color.”

They nodded, imagining the beast. Emmaline shivered.

“They would have sharp teeth,” she said. “Not like a shark—like needles. So when the fish swim into their mouths, they get stuck, like a cage.”

Now it was Peter’s turn to squirm as he pictured the sight of a fish beating wildly up against the bars of teeth, tearing itself to pieces on the razor edges. Sister and brother were quiet, gazing at the new ice that covered the holes they made in the water. For a moment, they were glad of the blanket of ice. Even though the beast had only been invented a few minutes, they couldn’t help but be grateful for the barrier between them and the monster. For a moment, underneath one of the patches of new, clear ice, Emmaline could have sworn she saw a flicker of darkness, swishing past like the tip of a two-pronged tail, moving with swift silent purpose through the midnight water.

“But it’s probably just fish though,” she added quickly.

“Yeah,” Peter agreed, jamming his fingers back into his gloves. “Just fish. Monsters aren’t real.”

The wind howled past, rattling the frozen reeds around the pond, causing them both to jump and then laugh. The shuddering blades of grass mixed with the uneasy sound of their laughter, blending into an eerie melody that echoed across the stone dead pond.

“Just ghosts,” Emmaline said, jokingly.

Peter didn’t laugh like she was hoping. Instead, he tilted his head sideways slightly, as if he had picked up some sound on the wind. His eyes were curious, and for just a moment, Emmaline thought she saw his green eyes turn darker, almost black, like the water of the pond. She blamed it on the setting sun.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Just ghosts.” The legend of the monster only lasted two winters. Because the next winter

was their last winter. The one Emmaline’s father would talk about. “We should have known,” he would say, shaking his head back and forth, back and forth. “The blackberries were early that year. The foxglove kept blooming long into September. The summer was too long. Too hot. That’s how you know, Emmaline. That’s how you know.” She didn’t believe his stories.

The next spring, after Peter, she went into their backyard and tore up all the foxglove. She gripped each plant by the stem and ripped them out, one after the other, watching the dirt falling off the root. The plants were budding, not blooming. She never wanted to see them bloom again. She went methodically, starting in the corner of the yard by the house and working her way to the edge of the raised hills. Foxglove didn’t like the damp dirt by the pond, and it hated the sunlight. Which made her job easier. She tore up every plant and dumped their bodies into a pile to the side of the pond, on top of a pyre of dead twigs she had built atop the dry, silt bank.

She took a book of matches, stolen from her father’s office, out of her pocket. She lit the front page of yesterday’s newspaper, and inserted it into the base of the heap. She got down on her knees (her jeans would be ruined, she didn’t care, didn’t care) and blew, encouraging the fire to swell. Eventually it grew stronger, and she had to stand farther away, feeding the blaze larger and larger pieces of wood and paper and desiccated leaves until it began to glow with a strength of its own. And it didn’t need her. Soon, the wind was feeding the fire, whistling slightly as it brushed against the dry reeds, the crackling logs. Just ghosts, Peter had told her. Just ghosts.

The fire grew strong enough to begin to lick at the edges of the foxglove. Soon the vibrant spring leaves began to flicker at the edges, burning orange as embers quickly became black. The plants smoked profusely, and Emmaline wondered if her father could see it from the house. She didn’t care. She watched as the foxgloves caught flame, the leaves shuddering as the fire began to consume them raw, eating at their stalks, their unborn buds.

She watched the fire and tried not to remember the gash in the middle of the pond, sealed over with freshly formed ice. Clearer, cleaner than the ice around it. The trail of tiny footsteps leaving marks on the balding layer of snow. Right to the center of the pond.

I wish we could tear a hole through the pond, so the whole thing can be pretty like this.

Nobody knew why he had ventured out on the surface of the pond. Emmaline and Peter never went out on the water before. Maybe he had been curious; maybe he had been chasing a toy. A bug. A monster. Or nothing at all. Emmaline found the smooth new ice first. She called over her mother, who didn’t at first understand. But her father knew. He knew the pond, he knew the winter, and he knew the water.

They had sent her away when they dredged the pond, to her grandmother’s house. She knew they found the body before she even asked. She never asked at all. Emmaline knew that they could not have found Peter in the depths of the midnight water. They would have found the monster, still and pale and bloated, its teeth glinting with mud and silt and blood, still slightly agape in twisted pleasure from its last meal. She had created the monster. She knew how it would behave. She knew.

The final leaf of foxglove finally surrendered to the blaze, and the fire seemed to gasp as it breathed its last. Then it was just ash. Ash and smoke, a greasy black smear on the gray-brown bank. She breathed in slowly, feeling the smoke coat her throat all the way to her lungs. She picked up the matchbook and threw it, as far as she could, into the newly thawed pond. She watched the greedy water suck at the paper cover, slowly seeping into the invisible cracks, until it was weighed down and sunk through the motionless surface without a sound.

There was no monster in the lake. Except the one she put there.

Abigail Lee Yale University, ’21