Oaks
I tell myself I’m just staying focused.
That’s the lie I lean on while the lake turns mean around us, while the camp tightens and the air gets sharp, while my wife watches from the fringe like she’s looking for a reason to light the whole thing on fire.
It’d be easier to deal with a monster in the water than the girl sitting twenty yards away pretending she doesn’t give a damn whether I look at her.
So I don’t look.
Not when the club girls circle her like vultures and call her names they know will stick.
Not when Bethany stands nearby, too still, pretending she’s above it while she lets it happen.
Not when Brittany walks away stiff-backed like she’s swallowing something sharp enough to cut her throat.
Legend’s voice cuts through the clearing. “We’re expanding the grid. South bank and into the timberline. Royal, take two prospects. Holler, swing the marina side.”
I nod like this’s all that matters.
Because it should be.
A girl’s missing. Reverend’s probably behind it and points fingers at the club. Blood showed up in a boat. Drag marks cut through mud like someone was hauled. And the sheriff keeps shrugging like this is a rumor he can out-wait.
That’s real.
My current problem.
My problem with Brittany ain’t supposed to be real.
But it is.
A boat shows up just before dusk.
Not the missing girl’s. Another one.
It’s half-drifted against a stand of cattails near the cove, rope snapped clean like something yanked it hard enough to tear the hardware loose. The hull’s gouged along one side, fiberglass chewed and splintered.
“Rock?” one of the prospects asks.
“There ain’t rocks out that deep,” Holler mutters.
I crouch near the dock and run my thumb along the damage. It ain’t a clean scrape. It’s uneven. Jagged. The kind of mark that makes your brain try to name it and then refuse.
I don’t say teeth out loud.
The owner’s a middle-aged guy from Danville, sunburned and shaking. He swears he anchored it right. Swears it was fine at midnight. Swears he heard something heavy move under him when he went out to take a piss.
“Like what?” Royal asks.
The man swallows hard. “Like something big, fifteen feet long.”
Everyone goes quiet.
Somebody behind me mutters, “Herry, that Lake monster.”
Damn thing has a name now. I stand and look at the water.
Flat. Shiny. Harmless.
Bullshit.
But the air feels wrong.
It gets worse overnight.
A dock on the far side collapses. Posts ripped sideways, boards floating loose like snapped ribs. No storm. No wake big enough to do that.
A prospect’s tent is found at dawn, canvas torn open from the bottom up. He swears he heard breathing outside before it ripped. Says he saw something pass between trees on two legs before it hit the shoreline and slipped under.
We give him hell for it.
We don’t laugh long.
Because by midmorning, somebody finds livestock down near a small farm off the back road.
A goat, half-dragged toward the treeline. Throat torn open. Not eaten clean. Not like a coyote does. Not like any animal I’ve ever seen in these woods.
Legend stands over it, jaw working.
“This ain’t coincidence,” Royal says quietly.
“No,” I agree.
It ain’t.
“Ain’t a scary story. It’s sabotage and men fucking with us. Maybe even some of our own,” Legend says.
And somewhere under all that noise and damage there’s still a missing girl.
News vans sits at the access road with microphones in strangers’ hands and locals whispering about curses and cryptids, all of it blending together until truth becomes a mystery people can consume.
I stand at the edge of the dock that afternoon while men argue in low voices behind me.
“You think it’s them?” Holler asks.
“Pearly Gates?” Royal replies. “They don’t leave marks like that.”
“They leave fear,” Holler mutters.
Legend answers, “They do whatever they have to do to throw us off the trail.”
I don’t give my opinion, because my mind’s somewhere else.
Down near the fire pit.
Where Brittany sits on the far edge of a bench, pretending she doesn’t care that I didn’t come back to the cabin last night.
Where she laughed with Lottie earlier like she wasn’t hurt.
Legend’s words sit in my skull like a splinter.
You made the choice. You made the commitment. VP. Marriage. Club before everything.
And Bethany’s standing across camp with eyes like sharpened glass. She twists my wedding band she found and slipped onto her thumb. She’s waiting for the moment I stumble and give her the excuse to go to the sheriff with all the blackmail her dad left her.
I drag a hand over my face.
“Something’s off,” Royal says beside me.
“You mean besides the torn docks and vanishing women?” I mutter.
He does not smirk.
“No,” he says quietly. “I mean inside.”
I glance at him.
He’s watching the treeline, but he ain’t talking about trees.
“You’re slipping,” he adds.
I don’t deny it.
It’s Brittany.
It’s her walking too close to the shoreline with her stubborn chin lifted.
It’s her not knowing when to back up because she’s tired of being told what to do.
If something’s taking girls near water, if Pearly Gates’s escalating, if somebody’s using the monster story to cover something darker, she’s in the middle of it whether she understands that or not.
Legend turns slowly, scanning the shoreline, the trees, the cabins. His face is hard in a way I recognize. The face he wears right before he makes the kind of decision people regret.
“This ain’t a camp out anymore,” he says finally. “We tighten everything.”
More men posted overnight. No one alone near water. Everyone moved closer to officer cabins.
It’s supposed to make it safer.
It just makes it smaller.
And smaller means pressure.
Pressure makes fractures worse.
That night, I stand outside the main cabin row watching lantern light flicker through windows.
Brittany’s inside the cabin we shared for one night, probably sitting stiff and quiet, pretending she doesn’t care that I’ve kept my distance. I did it for the right reasons. That’s what I keep telling myself.
But the lake don’t feel like a place where right reasons matter anymore.
I light a cigarette I don’t even want since I quit years ago and stare at the black stretch of water. Because the truth is, whatever’s out there, human, animal, myth, it ain’t the only thing circling.