The Pond When the Moon Threw No Light
Excerpt originally published in green fuse burning by tiffany morris. Reprinted by permission of stelliform press.
Tiffany Morris. Green Fuse Burning. Stelliform Press. $19.99, ISBN: 9781778092664
The Pond When the Moon Threw No Light
24” x 36”
Acrylic on canvas
The first in the series, The Pond When the Moon Threw No Light is a charcoal-hued grisaille: the dark grey brushstrokes are thickly layered on the canvas, creating a deep, mossy texture, surprising the viewer with the revelation that this piece contains no alien elements — you would almost think the moss had formed on the work itself. The darkness of night on the pond is illuminated with small strokes of gold and white, surrounding pale humanoid figures that are barely discernible. Francis depicts these figures in faint outlines, descending, ghost-like, into the black pool of the water. The mysterious figures seem unaware of the viewer’s gaze, and the overall impact is one of voyeuristic unease. The interaction between the human and other elements of the natural world is unsettled here, punctuating the darkness only with the movement into water and the viewer’s sense of witness.
*
Dark shining night sighed into the expanse of the pond. The Frog Croaking Moon, Squoljikus, was a faint sliver humming into the sky above. It threw no light.
Rita watched the running silhouettes from the pitch-black shadow of the cabin bedroom. She’d awakened to the crunch of footsteps on gravel and stumbled, sweaty and confused, from the rickety single bed. Footfalls rushed the spring peepers and bullfrogs into silence. Her own heavy breathing surrounded her, almost obscuring soft movements down the bank: splashing deep into the green-brown water.
Pain pulsed up her leg from the stumble. She crouched at the window, breathing dust and mildew as she squinted over the windowpane and into the distance. Technically, there was no reason to stay hidden in the bedroom, but there was also no reason for anyone to be at the isolated pond, or near this small cabin — let alone for people to be in the water in the middle of the night.
A bloated, pale body flashed through her mind, conjured from the passive consumption of a thousand police procedurals screaming blue light into her parents’ living room. She fumbled toward the bedside table, feeling for the cool glass of her phone. No texts had sent or come through since she’d arrived at the cabin, but just in case — just in case — she should check. Her hand shook and she nearly dropped the phone. When she hit the button she grimaced, waiting for light that didn’t come. Her phone was dead. From outside the window came a loud thump, followed by dragging, grunting.
A body. A limp assembly of limbs, heavy with the absence of story. Of course. It had to be a body. Rita shut her eyes tight. It couldn’t be held off; the memory was a wave destined to crash over her. It always happened this way — a procession, a rosary of grief, focusing and shuddering through her memory: her father in his coffin. The eagle feather in his hands. His eyes — she remembered, with a lurch in her gut — were sewn shut. No matter how much she’d tried to forget that fact, she couldn’t forget anything she’d learned about the embalming process in late-night YouTube spirals, her wakefulness burning electric with the fear of her own mortality.
Incense and murmured prayers had filled the thick basement air of the reserve church. Prayers her tongue couldn’t shape. She had neither the full grasp of the Mi’kmaw language at her disposal, nor the religious background of her cousins or her brother. Maybe if she had grown up on the rez it would be different; the community was ninety percent Catholic, eight percent Baha’i, and traditional in their own admixtures. It was a place where prayer could be shaped by any number of languages, few of which spoke to her own soul, or her life, or her memories.
The trauma rhythm continued its perfect torture: the same flashbacks came in their expected sequence. The hospital looming in the distance. The ICU with its bodies stretched out in beds, some destined for death despite everyone’s efforts, prayers, begging palms held open to the sky.
What could she do? Rita exhaled again, a slow and deliberate attempt at calm taken from a history of therapy appointments where bored counsellors recommended breathing techniques, strategies for noticing her own embodiment through body scans, stretches, any number of ways to contend with the weight of her being. The perfect blackness of night in the cabin danced swirls in her adjusting eyes as she breathed, steadying only when the sounds outside stopped. Crouching at the window, she stared as silence cut through the dark. She couldn’t see anything out there.
Maybe this wasn’t real. Hallucination or not, she could ignore it, crawl back under the covers. If whatever was going on out there was real, it would not be worth the risk of being seen. It could be people out for a midnight swim, people throwing anything into the pond — not necessarily a body — and whatever happened in this nowhere town was none of her business, right? It could be some weird local thing, she didn’t know. Possibly no one had noticed her rented car, itself black and tucked beside the cabin in the black night. She could check the locks, go back to bed, forget all of this.
She could be dreaming. She’d sleepwalked as a kid, hallucinated all manner of things, found herself waking up on the porch some mornings with muddy feet and the imprint of grass on her arms, impressions of an unknown hour. There was even the one night, when she’d awakened to a gunshot, the sounds of screaming that rose and fell and then died. In the morning she’d told her mother about it in a trembling voice. Her mother had laughed. She hadn’t heard anything. Rita must have been dreaming. No one else had heard anything, her mother had said, and surely such a thing would cause a ruckus, would wake the whole neighborhood, wouldn’t it? For the rest of the week Rita had scanned the newspaper but found nothing.
“Well, t’us, vivid dreams are a good thing for an artist to have,” her mother reassured her. “Lots of creative people get inspiration that way.”
The Mi’kmaw language always sounded weird coming from her mother, even though her mother was half Mi’kmaw. She had been estranged from that side of her family for years and wouldn’t tell Rita why, wouldn’t share any knowledge with her other than a few words or phrases. She was much more into telling Rita how she should behave and what convoluted beauty rituals could improve her appearance. Rita knew her mother wouldn’t want her to paint the grisly crime scene she’d sworn she witnessed. She’d prefer the kind of dreams that etch happiness into waking hours, the kind that immerse the dreamer in warmth like bathwater.
But when the nightmares continued, her mother took her to the doctor, then a therapist, and neither were able to pin down what was wrong with her. A vivid imagination, Dr. Rose had finally said, and when Rita looked over at her mother she saw the gleam of smug satisfaction in her eyes. In that moment, Rita knew her mother would never care as much about her mental health as she did about being right. She mourned what her life could have been if her mother had been able to open up to her more, to see Rita for who she really was and not just who she wanted her to be: not a doll, or a mirror, or a blank canvas onto which she could project her hangups, but an imperfect child. If those things had been different then maybe Rita’s dreaming would have taken the shape of sunlight, beaches, calm light-dappled days in the fresh air. Those were the dreams that begged to be made real, not the scenes that haunted her well into adulthood.
Rita crawled back to the bed. The floor was cold on her hands and knees, the sheets soft and smelling vaguely of bleach and fresh air. It would be better — if something untoward were really happening — if she pretended that she wasn’t there. Her back pressed to the mattress, she stared into the black expanse of ceiling above her and willed her body to relax. She tensed her feet then released the tension. A body scan meditation, like her old therapist had instructed. She moved her focus up her body: tense, relax, tense, relax. One body part at a time. A dismembered self slowly made whole.
This was just like her, right? Just like her to avoid the problem, any problem, to do nothing and hope it would go away. But this was a dream. It had to be.
She listened, her limbs wire-tight. The footsteps and splashing had faded, but their echoes thrummed through her. She would need to do more than one body scan meditation tonight. Outside there was no sound of doors opened or closed, no motor, no rattling gravel from a retreating car. As the silence stretched into the night, she had no way of knowing how much time had gone by. The thing to do was to fall asleep again. She was never good at waking herself up; this was the only option, to close her eyes and drift away. What was it to fall asleep in a dream? Nothing piled upon nothing. Immersion into a waiting oblivion.
She closed her eyes and the darkness, its silence, took her with it.
Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the swampcore horror novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Books, 2023) and the Elgin-nominated horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night (Vintage Books), as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others. She has an MA in English from Acadia University with a focus on Indigenous Futurisms and apocalyptic literature. She can be found at tiffmorris.com or on twitter/bluesky @tiffmorris.