Prompt: a terrifying twist.
Being afraid of the water was only a weakness in summertime. Still—it felt especially mortifying to a girl of thirteen. Such creatures are expected to show every weakness, or no weakness at all, and that left Sanity stuck somewhere in between being the tough girl and the scaredy-cat.
Sanity St. James. What a world of a name for one small girl from Antigonish, who couldn’t believe her luck: It had snowed early this year.
She wore her orange parka, the one she was never without once the weather turned cold. Her boots were old, but the left one still kept the snow out. As for the right, Sanity had taken to mummifying her sock with a plastic grocery bag. She’d told her aunt a thousand times to bring her own reusables to the market—but one stray Sobey’s bag was probably not going to murder any turtles from the depths of Sanity’s boot. Not if she had anything to say about it.
Her colleagues trailed along behind her. Sanity’s mother had told her long ago, possibly in a dream, that people you saw regularly but didn’t particularly like were not to be wasted on the word “friends.” Her mother’s people at the paper factory had been colleagues—tiresome, vapid, khaki-wearing losers—and that was just about how Sanity felt about her schoolmates. But being a kid is a thankless job, sometimes, and besides: you’ve got to have someone who will follow you into the woods.
They’d been walking for miles now. Only Sanity’s aunt knew which trail they’d taken, and she was the opposite of a helicopter parent. “Back before dark” was their only restriction, and there was a good hour left before that became an issue.
“Look!” One of her colleagues, Tim, pointed a mittened hand off to the left of the group, somewhere through the trees. “C’mon, follow me!”
“We shouldn’t leave the path,” said Raina, who was really perfectly nice and rather clever. But, because of comments like this one, she’d been labeled something worse than a scaredy-cat. A rule-follower.
“It’s not really leaving the path. It’s right there!”
“What’s there?” asked Sanity, cautiously. The map in her head was...well. She didn’t really have one. They could be anywhere.
The giggle that ripped through the group make the hair on Sanity’s neck stand up. Her cheeks burned.
“Come on then,” she commanded, setting off after Tim. The giggles stopped, and gave way to crunching twigs and the sounds of descending a shallow hill.
The lake was frozen. It had only been this cold for a week or so, but the crust of white where the water had been looked thick. Too thick.
“Betcha won’t walk on it,” said Tim, ever the instigator. He elbowed her in the ribs.
“Don’t,” warned Raina, in stereo with the sensible voice in Sanity’s head. The sane voice. The one that didn’t sound a thing like her mother’s.
She looked at the place where her leaky boot met the edge of the shore, kicked away the frothy snow there. Beneath was ice so dark it looked black. Wasn’t that supposed to mean it was thicker? Safer? That helpful fact was one too many Wikipedia articles in the past to tell for certain.
She didn’t care about proving anything to stupid Tim. Not a jot. But she was tired of being afraid.
Try it, said a different inner voice. Now: this one sounded a good deal more like her mother’s. That was a bad sign.
The first step onto the lake was anticlimactic. So were the second, the third, and the fourth. But there was one peculiar thing about Sanity that pushed at the back of her brain in moments like this—right below where a lobotomy scar would be, if she ever decided to get one. It ran in the family. Once she began things, she had trouble stopping.
“Come back!” Tim’s voice was calling behind her, too far away to feel real. He sounded frantic. Was she at thirty steps now, or forty? The ice felt thick as a sidewalk. Where would she end up, if she kept going? It felt like something was out here. Keep going, keep going, keep going....
The ice beneath her feet shook, throwing her to her knees. Sanity frowned—this wasn’t how it felt when ice cracked. She’d stepped in frozen puddles before, testing her luck, pushing herself. This felt like a truck was driving across the ice, but not from above.
Sanity heard a gutteral growl, and then felt the ice all around her explode. The last thing she felt was her right boot slipping away, leaving her plastic-wrapped foot to plunge into the water first.
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