Mom told me to go outside and play.
This was in the late ’90s, in a town where nothing bad had ever really happened. Yeah, a couple of years before, some kids beat a girl to death, but they had been tried and put into jail, or wherever messed-up Canadian teenagers went. The streets were safe again.
We had just moved into the neighborhood with my new stepfather and my even newer baby brother. Up until this point in my life, my mom had been a suffocating combination of overbearing and overprotective, but when she got remarried, everything abruptly changed. I was a few months away from turning thirteen, and she had a baby to look after and a house to decorate. So, even though a year before she would have had a meltdown at the thought of me wandering the neighborhood alone, what with kidnappers and devil worshippers and all that, now it was nothing more than a command she yelled out with her back turned as she changed a diaper.
“Jesus Christ, stop moping around – go outside and play.”
The street we moved to was a big step up from our last apartment before she had met Mike. It was just the two of us in this crummy one-bedroom place – I got the bedroom, and she had a futon in the living room next to a giant brick of a computer that she worked on late into the night. Life with Mike was a lot different than what I was used to. He managed all the money, paid all the bills, and bought this boat of a station wagon with a fancy backward-facing car seat. When he wanted Mom to quit her job to move from the city to the suburbs, she was more than happy to do it. At that point, she would have probably said yes to anything he’d asked.
Our new house would have been really something if I’d had any friends. It was a long rectangular parcel of land on a quiet street that backed up onto a waterway the locals called the Gorge. It was sort of like an inlet, branching off from the ocean, and the stretch outside our home was generally calm - the peace intermittently interrupted by a paddling kayaker, or more often, by the disgusting croaking of a rancidly smelly oily black bird that I later learned was a cormorant.
Our whole house was still packed up in boxes – a few from where my mom and I had lived, more from Mike’s place, and then the rest shiny, new appliances and furniture from department stores, still packed in foam peanuts and huge swathes of cardboard. I was pretty sure Mike was rich, even though I did find it strange how he made Mom show him her grocery receipt each time she came home from the store, inspecting the price of every single item while she sat silently on the couch next to him. At the time, I just assumed that’s what rich people needed to do, to know where their money was going.
I knew there was a high school a few blocks away, and a middle school a little further down the road. It was too far for me to walk alone, but my mom had mentioned something about a bus. It was June, and the school year seemed far enough away that I could almost pretend that it would never happen.
I left the house with nothing in my pockets – this was before cell phones, and I was too young to carry bank cards or an ID. My mom had grabbed my arm before I left and, with a ballpoint pen, scrawled our new address on my forearm. I protested, but a part of me was glad she was still worried about me. “Don’t go into the water,” she said, already out of the room.
I walked towards the park, hanging a left at the top of our driveway. The houses were all built to view the water, wraparound patios, and giant windows that let me see inside almost every single one I passed. It was so profoundly different from the cramped building we’d moved from; it almost felt like another planet.
There was a park a few blocks away, and I reached it in about ten minutes. It was still early enough in the summer that the heat hadn’t set in yet, and early enough in the day that the dew hadn’t evaporated from the blades of grass in the yards I passed. I shivered as I entered the park, tall, ancient trees curving over the path, blocking the sun.
It really was a beautiful place. Sometimes when I look back and try to focus on the moments before everything terrible happened, I can almost remember the smell – wet and earthy and alive. It felt like I’d stepped into the forest, and not just a beautifully manicured rich person park with smooth paved paths lined with iron street lamps.
I heard the children’s voices before I saw them, tucked away off the path, and close to the edge of the water. There were three of them, very clearly siblings, each with varying shades of blonde hair, the fair skin of their ears and noses tinged red by a recent sunburn. They were all kneeling over something wet, next to a pink plastic bucket full of water. The oldest seemed around my age. He had a rock in his hand, flat and heavy, fit perfectly in his palm. Next to him was a younger girl, with a thinner, jagged stone, that she held like a dagger.
They must have heard me, or at least heard me stop walking as I stared at them, because their heads all raised at once, dark eyes registering me at the same time.
I opened my mouth to speak, but the youngest boy was quick to greet me, smiling through a set of missing front teeth. “Did you see the monster?”
I hesitated, resisting the urge to look behind me to see if there was someone else they were talking to. “What?” I managed, nervously shifting my weight from foot to foot.
The kid gestured to the pavement he was crouching over. There was something there, a silvery streak, a little less than a foot long, some kind of weird fish that looked like a seahorse that had been pulled into a thin straight line. It took me another second to realize that he was talking about the creature spread flat on the ground.
“Oh, shit.” I said, stepping forward, “What is that thing?”
“It’s a pipefish,” The oldest kid said, face grim, “We caught it in the cove.” Behind the children was a small, quiet stretch of beach, framed by two giant rocks that shielded it from the ocean currents that swirled a little further out. This wasn’t the same gentle water that I saw outside of my home; this was where the gorge began to open up into the ocean.
“You went into the ocean?” I asked, surprised. The kid’s clothes were damp from the waist down, fat drops of salt water dripping onto the ground.
The oldest boy shrugged, “We just waded in.”
I was about to ask something else - probably something stupid about if they were really allowed to swim, or if their parents knew that they had tried to swim when the younger girl suddenly shrieked, and with an awful burst of violence, brought down the sharp edge of her stone into the body of the creature.
All at once the voices of the children exploded into elated shouts, the youngest boy laughing and trying to grab the lower part of the body in his slippery wet fingers. The fish moved then, ever so slightly, and I realized that it was still alive. Then, the older brother grabbed its upper body and with a yank, the two pulled it apart.
They were like animals, in that next moment, all hands and chatter, trying to tear the body into smaller pieces, casting off parts that were too small to grab. I just watched, a foot away, close enough to see the pieces as they hit the pavement with a wet slapping sound. On the rock above a cormorant landed, watching with great interest through beady black eyes.
It was over as quickly as it had begun. The children were in high spirits now, all grins and heavy breaths. The youngest brother moved towards the bucket and with a swift motion, pulled out another long, silvery fish, dropping it to the ground with a splash. It writhed, ever so slightly in the water that pooled under it, barely enough to make a ripple.
“What are you doing?” I asked, although I knew immediately that it was a stupid question. It was pretty obvious, they were tearing some sort of sea animals into pieces like wild dogs. I just watched it happen, and was probably about to watch it happen again.
The younger girl spoke then, hands still curled around the sharp stone. “We’re killing monsters.” She said, flatly. “First we catch them.” She pointed to the water. “And then we kill them.” Her finger moved towards the carnage on the ground below.
The fish on the ground had stopped moving, and the older brother took a step towards it, grasping his rock in both hands. I saw his muscles tense as he made a swift movement and raised it above his head. The younger boy was laughing again, clasping his hands together, eager for what was about to come.
“Wait.” I said. The children stopped. The oldest stared at me, rock still above his head. I cleared my throat. “I saw a bigger one.” I gestured towards the water. “A bigger monster.”
They turned to look out at the quiet water in the cove and the tiny white caps just beyond its reach. The oldest looked back at me, skeptical. “I swear to God.” I said, “It was absolutely massive.”
I had caught their attention, even just momentarily. On the ground, I saw a hint of movement from the fish, as it held on desperately to life.
“I can show you.” I blurted out, looking around for something, anything to distract them. Next to the rock that protected the cove was a large tree with branches that seemed like they might just be low enough to reach. “Come on, I’ll show you.” I took a breath, then started to scramble up.
Below me the oldest boy hesitated, his rock now hanging at his side as he palmed it with an agitated grip. “What,” I asked, a taunting edge to my voice “Are you scared?”
One by one the kids followed me up the branches, scrambling onto the flat top of the rock. The younger boy was almost too small to reach, but his oldest brother and I worked together to pull him up. We were at a good vantage point now, still under the tree, but now with a clear view of the choppy water, and the sheltered cove that lay below us. Even from this height I could see the sun catch on the scaled pieces of flesh that were spread out on the pavement below.
I tried to gesture outwards with a confident resolution, somewhere just off the shore. “That’s where I saw it.” I told them, “Huge. At least six feet long. It was crazy.”
The oldest brother curled his lip, studying my expression closely, “That’s impossible.” He said. “They don’t even get that big.”
“This one did.” I felt a surge of adrenaline now as I watched him look out to the ocean, his features softening ever so slightly as he considered what I was saying. I crossed my arms across my chest against the chill of the wind. “If you want a real monster, that’s where it is. But only if you’re not afraid.”
I took a step backward, a plan forming in my head. I would jump down, take the bucket, put the fish back in the water. It wouldn’t stop them forever, but at least I wouldn’t have to watch them kill anything else. I turned just for a moment, to see the fastest way to climb down, when one of the younger kids gasped loudly, their voice only a little louder than the wind that had begun to pick up.
The oldest brother was gone. His siblings leaned over the edge, his sister on all fours, staring down into the swirling water and rocks below us. We waited, for a moment, in silence, watching for him to emerge. He didn’t.
I was frozen in place.
It was his sister next who dropped her rock and jumped down into the water, screaming her brother’s name as she fell. My whole life I’ve been so careful to avoid reading anything about the aftermath of what happened, which was difficult considering the television segments and articles, and local newspapers with black and white photos of a beautiful family that was just so happy before tragedy pulled it apart. When I try to remember the name she yelled, all I hear is the roar of the wind and the splash her body made when it hit the water. I saw her head then, briefly, a mess of stringy blonde hair that immediately dipped below the surface, out of sight. A moment passed, but I didn’t see her again.
Up until this point I believe I was faultless, a victim of circumstance and a misguided good deed, but what happened next I do genuinely regret. But you have to understand, when the youngest boy turned to me, tears in his eyes, I reached out to comfort him, to pull him away from his edge, and I watched as his gaze went to my arm. The arm where my address was penned in my mother’s neat printing, a house that she was so excited about starting a new life in, away from all the unpaid bills and cramped apartments, and late hours she spent working just to keep the lights on.
It was her I thought of as I put my hands on the little boy’s shoulders, pushing him backward off the rock and into the water. Like his siblings, he sank, the swirling tide covering any hint of a splash.
I came down from the rock then, carefully finding study branches for my feet to settle on as I returned to the ground. I did what I’d planned to – I emptied the bucket in the ocean and returned to get the fish. By that point, it was clearly very dead, and even though it hung lifelessly in my hands I still threw it back into the water, hoping the gesture counted in some small way. Then I went home.
Nobody ever came to ask me anything, and why would they? From how my mom explained it to me, her voice hushed and gentle as the local news played in the background, it was an awful accident. Three young kids were playing by the water, catching the fish that swam near the shore and had somehow fallen in. They got caught in a rip tide, which wasn’t uncommon for the area. Locals knew not to swim there, and after the deaths, some shiny new signs were installed to warn people to stay out of the water.
My mom kept me inside for the rest of the summer, fussing over me the moment I stepped foot outside, and only allowing me to accompany her and my brother when she went to run errands, pushing the stroller into the park as I stayed close by her side.
Whenever we passed by the little cove, I always tried to avert my eyes. Even then, I knew it was all a mistake—I was just a child myself. Still, it was strange living so close to where they all had died. In our house at night, I would sometimes look out my window at the calm waters at the edge of our property, and more than once, I swear I saw something shiny and thin glimmering in the water, at least six feet long. I was never able to look good before I would see it disappear under the surface, never to re-emerge.
It’s been years since this happened, and even though I’m grown with children of my own I often catch myself looking into bodies of water and seeing the hint of something long and lean rippling underneath the surface. And in these moments I catch myself thinking the same thing I used to ask myself when I was young - could it be that the children in the cove were right after all? Is it possible that the monster really does exist?