When I was younger I used to think that my mother was lying to me about the legend she’d tell me. I thought that it was just a silly story made up to scare me. People would call her crazy so I didn’t pay too much attention to it. I was little, and so naive. Now I’ve started to realize that things just don’t add up anymore. I’m not the stupid little girl I used to be and I think she’s correct about everything.
My mother and I were from Arkansas. To be more specific we were from Hemlock, Arkansas. It’s not marked on any maps and the population is small. It’s located near Lake Ouachita. Most people don’t even know the town exists and lately I’ve started to think that the people here try to keep it that way.
One of the things that makes everything even harder is that my mother doesn’t talk anymore, not even to me, not even about anything. I think that she got tired of the things people would say about her. Tired of all the whispers and the glances. The only reason that I’m even still in this town is to take care of her. It’s just easier to stay. She doesn’t really do much of anything for herself. She just sits in silence, some days she just doesn’t get out of bed.
Now that I’m older I go out to get the groceries and I notice all of the people that stare. All of the eyes that used to be on my mother are now on me. I notice that so many of the people that used to be here seem to have just one day stopped existing. There are many sad and empty houses that just sit unoccupied. My mother used to tell me to always keep an eye out because people would go missing sometimes. She said people would be here one minute and the next it’s like they were never here and we just wouldn’t talk about them again. She would though; people missing wasn’t just something she could brush off.
The disappearances didn’t happen all at once. Missing posters would get posted occasionally by the person’s family but nothing makes the paper. People would usually just say whoever had disappeared had just moved away. It’s not something that had attention drawn to it. I realized recently that it used to only be one disappearance a year but in the more recent years it seemed to be about two or three people.
My mother had told me that there was something in the water. She said there was something in the lake that most people never saw and sometimes when people went too close they just wouldn’t come back out. When I was little I laughed it off. Now that I’m older I think that she was right. I think that she was one of the people that saw it. I think that it’s time I saw it too.