The Pond
Winner – COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards, Prose
Zoe Kurland
Las Vegas is best in the bluish hours: the sleeping, honest time right before the sun breaks. In the suburbs, as the night yawns into day, low slung houses sit soundly against the sky. The nighttime chill has not yet gone, leaving the ground as cool and quiet as the moon. In this no man’s land, beyond the reach of the strip, dawn provides rare solitude; but still, Jack did not like it.
Jack woke at the crack each day, always with a wish that it was later than it was. Anything would do: a couple hours, a couple minutes; less time in the day to count the ways in which he had both too little and just enough. He would walk outside to a symphony of sprinkler heads sputtering before reams of dead life, each hiss and pop a reminder of the drought.
The drought had turned all of the lawns golden, but the heat was especially apparent in Jack’s backyard, where his turtle pond diminished by the day. With each inch of water lost, the more upset Jack’s wife became. After Jack lost his job at Casino Regal, Karen had given him a list of wishes upon which their life in Nevada was predicated; unfulfillment would result in immediate departure. Karen didn’t like Vegas if she wasn’t in the thick of it, so to mitigate suburban life, she’d need a plasma screen TV, a scooter, and a turtle pond in their backyard. Jack did not understand from where Karen divined her wishes, but that was the magic of her: she was a whimsical woman he did not quite understand.
With the intense heat, the pond had become a hostile environment. The turtles had communicated their dissatisfaction by methodically evacuating in secret (a grand feat for such slow creatures). It wasn’t long before Karen looked down and found that only one remained, bobbing lonely at the bottom.
…
Jack knew nothing of the neighbor, only that he had a boat which sat in the driveway hitched to a RAV-4. The boat had never moved, which unnerved Jack greatly. He was alarmed by the boat’s unyielding vigilance, an effect emphasized by a sharp tip which pointed forward and up towards a non-existent sea.
Jack did not want to ask the neighbor about the turtles, but Karen had begged, which made him uncomfortable, and thus he found himself on the adjacent porch, raising a hand to ring the bell. He pressed and waited, looking back towards the stretch of identical porches down the street.
After some shuffling within, a grizzled man opened the door. Jack noted his captain’s hat.
“Ahoy!” said the man.
Jack introduced himself and complimented the boat.
“I keep meaning to take her down to California,” said the man. “Set out to someplace. But I’ve had this feeling lately that it’s going to rain.”
Jack smiled and raised his eyebrows, coughing to cover a chuckle.
“Don’t you laugh,” said the man. “God does some pretty funny things when you don’t expect him to. The name’s Zachariah.” He cracked his back. “I’ve met all of the neighbors but you.”
“We’ve been here around a year now,” said Jack. That meant a year and a month since he’d married Karen.
Karen and Jack’s union was all due to plumbing; they had met when Karen had clogged the bathroom in one of the casino’s junior suites. Karen and ten other girls were sharing one room for a friend’s bachelorette party, and a penis necklace had gotten wedged in the shower drain.
A casino plumber usually has a lot to do, but on that day, most things seemed to be running smoothly. Jack had been down in the casino with the gamblers since the early morning, watching people who’d long lost themselves: their shirts were mussed, their hair had deflated, and dark circles bruised under their eyes. He liked to watch them because he felt exempt; it was a zoo, and he was the keeper.
When Jack got the call to unclog 407, he took his time walking up. When he arrived, he knocked, then put his ear to the door. This was his favorite part of the bachelorette scheme: the mad dash to hide the runoff, to pretend the room wasn’t over-occupied. Through the thick door, he could hear the scramble: the hisses towards the closet, the giggles sliding under the bed, the desperate pleas to “Shut up! Oh my god…”
As the door opened, a hush fell over the room.
A woman stood in the frame, smiling a lopsided smile. Mascara dripped down her face and ran black tracks onto her Bride to Be tee shirt.
“Cindy,” she said, holding out a hand.
Jack looked beyond her into the room. The lights were off, but the neon of the Vegas strip was bright, sending flashes of synthetic hue into the room. Shards of plastic shot glasses littered the floor, catching the shine and sending light beams across the walls. The sheets were off the bed, plastic necklaces sat in tangles next to cracked tiaras and plastic sunglasses. A white satin top hat hung on the corner of the TV; its veil fluttered against the glass, softening the static on the screen.
Jack opened the bathroom door and stepped in. The steam engulfed him. As he blinked, the golden shower curtain came into view, wiggling mirage-like in the heat. Heavy with water, the curtain dragged as Jack pulled it back, revealing a sopping wet woman. Her eyes were big and kind, but her hands were small.
“I’m Karen,” she said, shivering. She clasped her forearms tightly. Jack smiled.
“Well. ma’am,” said Jack, “let’s get you outta this tub.”
Breaking from the flashback, Jack shuddered with the knowledge of change.
Jack and Zachariah stood as a hot breeze blew in, tinkling some wind chimes at the front door.
Jack, remembering his purpose, explained the problem of the turtles and asked to look in Zachariah’s backyard. Zachariah bristled, eying Jack up and down. Jack crossed his arms over his chest and smiled a hero’s smile, the bathtub smile. Zachariah nodded and opened the door, leading Jack into the mouth of the house.
Jack tasted the rot before he smelled it. He wretched. It was the walls; they bore a rash-like stain, a peculiar blooming mottle. Zachariah walked ahead, turned back and beckoned.
“Now, don’t be scared,” said Zachariah with a laugh.
Jack breathed in through his mouth and followed him under the archway to the living room, hoping the house would not eat him whole.
As a plumber in Las Vegas, Jack mostly felt as though he’d seen it all. From nature came the desert life, the lizards and mice that scurried up the pipes, the roaches tumbling from the walls, the Gila Monsters and Mohave Greens, a whole jackrabbit in the drainpipe. From the humans: plumbing filled with rings, tee shirts, watches, sunglasses, dentures, and anything one could imagine, but nothing like the scene before him.
The room, devoid of furniture and decoration, was covered in a blanket of ropes of all lengths, widths, and colors, each one knotted into an intricate pattern. They lay atop one another in an impossibly thick mass that seemed to undulate and writhe like a pit of snakes. The longer Jack looked, the more objects he identified: neckties, bungee cords, towels, flags; anything that one could knot, Zachariah had done it.
“It’s my life’s passion, friend,” said Zachariah, picking up a knotted scarf and throwing it onto the pile. “I do it every day to remember who I am. If I forget how to knot, I might as well be dead.”
Jack nodded solemnly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d fixed someone’s plumbing.
“When you do something for a long time, it’s just in your hands, jumping at the tips of your fingers,” said Zachariah, taking Jack’s arm and leading him over the ropes. Jack’s stomach lurched; the room was a nauseating spiral of loops, hoops, and bewildering openings. He reached out a hand and it disappeared into the depths of the mass. Could something be dragging him down, pulling him into the corded sea? He drew his hand back, beset by the sudden fear he may never see it again.
Zachariah reached the screen door to the backyard. He looked back at Jack and squinted. “Now don’t go screaming about my yard to anyone, especially your wife.”
Jack nodded absently, still untangling his hand as Zachariah pushed open the door.
The reveal was Edenic: Zachariah’s yard was lush with life. As brown as everyone else’s lawn was, Zachariah’s was green: weeds, flowers, bushes, and ferns plumped proudly with hydration. Water, the elusive element, flowed abundantly in the yard, leaving nothing untouched. It was palatial, a sea of riches; jewel-like orbs of water bubbling on every leaf and petal.
“How?” Jack stammered, his mouth agape.
“Just lucky, I guess,” said Zachariah. “My water flows madly. Unfortunately, inside as well as outside— swells the walls. The sea follows me. That’s what my wife used to say. Now let’s look around for those turtles.”
Jack got on his hands and knees, less to search and more to feel the fertility beneath him, the chill of fecund earth. He finally understood Paradise Lost, the feeling of heaven denied. He crawled forward and let the ferns brush against his face, inciting a giddy sneeze. Nothing had ever felt as good, undone him in so quick a time. He wished he could bury himself, wake up wet and young. He put his face against the grass and turned his head to the left to see a pipe, half-hidden in the dirt. It was the main water line, but it was thick, nearly twice the size of his own.
The pair searched for some time, but the turtles could not be found, so Zachariah led Jack back to the front door.
“Glad I finally got to meet the neighbors,” said Zachariah. Jack nodded and saluted numbly, his hands still damp.
When Jack entered his house, the air was tight and dry. Karen sat facing the TV in a beige La-Z boy, her legs folded under like a duck.
The television was on mute. Jack looked at his wife as the news flashed colored light across her body. Her eyelids fluttered. A few months ago, he might have carried her to the bedroom.
Lying in bed, Jack wondered just how he had gotten to where he was. The time between then and now seemed a haze; there was no certain point, no obvious beginning, but life had happened nonetheless.
All he could think of was the rope: this strange man’s intricate world of wires and bandages, twine and shoelaces, winding into one other in an eternal embrace. Jack was sure Zachariah would have knotted him if he could.
In the cool of the evening, with the sounds of the television whispering a room away, Jack felt his fingers vibrate. Driven by a force unknown, he rose from the bed and opened the screen door to the backyard. He walked past the turtle pond towards the fence, feeling for a hole about the size of a silver dollar. Jack poked his fingers through; on the other side, he felt a dampness in the air. He stood up and gathered himself, closing his eyes and knowing that beyond this moment was intention, choice, and therefore, purpose. He leaned his head back and kicked the fence in.
As he closed his hands around Zachariah’s plumbing, the world belonged to him.
…
In the ensuing weeks, Jack pointed out to Karen how wet the grass was, how full the pond was, how green the shrub became and how much water they had for showers and baths and boiling and cooking and all that it made her think about was how she had never had a feeling that she’d trusted. All of her friends knew this about her. When Cindy got engaged, Karen felt a chasm open within her, an emptiness and insecurity that threatened her ability to be a person. When Jack pulled open the shower curtain, she felt safe.
“I’m in love with him,” she told her friends. “At first sight. I want to be with him for the rest of my life.”
They all laughed. Cindy told her she was crazy. Everyone was always telling her she was crazy. Sometimes, even when everyone has said it a million times, one time just is the last straw. Karen married Jack that night.
Marriage was glorious at first. The two of them lived like kings in Jack’s junior suite, sipping small drinks from the minibar, using little soaps and shampoos, the satin sheets always in a bundle at the foot of the bed. Karen loved the Vegas life, the glitz and glam, the immediacy of risk and indulgence. She didn’t feel the need to go anywhere; the casino gave her everything. When Jack worked, Karen got dressed up and went down to the slots. Men flirted with her and bought her drinks at 11 in the morning, leaving her buzzy and blurred for the rest of the day, which she'd spend at the store or the movies or the bathroom or wherever life seemed to take her.
Since they had left the casino, life deflated. No one tells you what it’s like in the suburbs, the oppressive smallness of a gated community, far outside the luxury of the city center. The size of her home had doubled, but it only made for more vacuums: voids where furniture needed to be added, friends needed to sit, where life failed to happen as it had.
The newfound abundance of water could not fix that. When Karen turned on a faucet, water burst forth like it had been waiting there for years, building and pushing until someone let it out, screaming out of the pipes. The house had become turgid with it; everything leaked and rattled, always in need of attention.
Jack would hear the water come on, rush into the room and shout over the sound of the stream, “Look at the pressure, look at how it runs!”
Karen would look at him and nod. The turtles were still gone, so the water barely mattered.
For the last year, she had been alternating between sleeping on the chair and the bed. The bed she only slept in when she felt in love; she slept in the chair when she did not. In the chair, she folded her legs under herself as she had done since she was a child. They always fell asleep in the night. She’d wake up pained, her legs a host of pins and needles. The space below her torso became something amorphous; she pondered the physical presence of her limbs against the absence of their feeling.
Karen hadn’t spoken to her friends in months. Her only visitor had been her mother. Karen treated her to the buffet and paid full price.
Her mother didn’t know much of anything, and to her, shine looked like wealth. She just smiled at Karen as they walked through the gift shop, fingering shot glasses, keychains and snow globes.
“You’re a lucky girl,” Karen’s mother had said, picking up a rhinestone studded cross necklace. “God loves you.”
Karen walked outside and just screamed silently sometimes. She liked to wail. She liked to just say things sometimes too, even if they didn’t matter. She liked jokes and iced tea. She missed the turtles that had gone away and she missed her friends. Her mind was a jumbly mess of things, some of them were mean things, bad things, ungrateful and ungodly things. She wanted to watch more TV, she wanted to keep her hands busy, she wanted to get cats and dogs and frogs and more turtles and she wanted to travel, but she couldn’t figure out how to go.
One morning, as Jack snored in the bedroom, Karen lifted herself off of the chair. As usual, her legs were asleep, but she needed to get some air, regardless of whether or not her legs followed.
She army-crawled to the backyard, dragging her dead legs behind her. She reached up and pushed open the screen to see her mutant oasis, a garden full of dead, soggy grass and weeds upon weeds upon weeds. She didn’t know what had happened. The yard was alive, but it was not beautiful. The turtle pond was a flat hole in the ground, filled beyond the brim, dark and mirror-like against the pre-dawn sky. The weeds had grown over the tile to make it look like some gaping maw: a big, ugly, unfinished drain.
Grasping bunches of weeds in her fists, Karen pulled herself towards the hole. She didn’t even have to look in to know. Something told her that they were all gone, every single one of them. The last had left. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t scream, she didn’t wail. She didn’t have the energy.
Out of the corner of her eye, Karen saw a tube sticking out of the fence; she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before. On her hands, she dragged herself over, muddying the front of her leopard camisole, smelling the rotten wet of the grass. She found a pipe buried in the ground, one side dipping into their yard, the other dipping into the neighbor’s. She peeked through the fence to see a yard full of dying things.
Karen’s stomach turned as she crawled back into the house. Her legs were angry and heavy as corpses. She dragged herself to the bathroom and threw up. She flushed the toilet and it gurgled madly. She groaned and the house groaned back. She leaned against the bathtub and looked at the wall. It pulsed. She blinked and it stopped.
Her body was damp and clammy, which made her feel like she did at the bachelorette party. She climbed into the tub and turned on the water. It rushed out hard, slapping against the porcelain. She closed her eyes and leaned back. She thought about Florida.
Karen didn’t notice when the house began to shake. It was sort of slow, at first. One could even mistake it for dizziness, but it persisted far longer than a spell, growing in magnitude. Karen pulled back the curtain to see the wall expanding, pregnant with rushing liquid.
Karen stared as the wall bubbled out. Her legs still refused to move, and her arms would not budge either. They were tired, she was tired. She must be asleep, she thought. Dreaming nonsensically. Why wouldn’t her legs just run?
Her mind wandered to Jack. Where was he? Asleep? Contented? He’d been waking late these days. But more importantly, where were the turtles? Were they swimming in the walls? Why didn’t they want to stay with her?
As Karen contemplated, paint splattered onto her face; it drooped, tacky and sticky. The wall was closing in, pressing against her cheek. Karen began to sob, but not for a reason she could discern. She wasn’t too scared, but she was empty.
And in one fell swoop, the house emptied too. The walls burst in the bathroom, water sloshing out in every direction, tossing Karen into a fish tank vortex, swirling into the house and surfacing by the TV, which played the news.
Still legless, Karen floated on the river of water out into the main room where pipes poked out from walls, spitting their contents into the house. Jack was nowhere to be seen. She tried to call for him, but her mouth wouldn’t open. She paddled as hard as she could to stay afloat, but her legs dragged, leaving her weak against the tide.
Jack had been overzealous when connecting the pipes. He’d entwined them, extending the tubing all over one another in a knotty mess of white plastic and rusted green, a pile of his passion. There had been too much pressure, too many fiddlings; the burst was inevitable.
Jack might die, thought Karen as she floated out of the house. She couldn’t think about it.
With one large whoosh, the house spat her out; she spilled flat onto the street and looked up. Water pooled around her.
Outside, the day had come quickly. The sky looked like sherbet, a mess of pastels greying and bleeding as the sun rose in double time, rushing to illuminate the strangeness of the morning. It was pretty, but not enough to justify a life. Karen closed her eyes and lay back, floating in the street. She hoped she’d be taken away, but the water around her was still. It would have to be something else.
“Ahoy!”
Karen looked up to see a man in a sailor’s hat, his skin shining in the sun. He stood in his boat, which now floated lightly, bobbing as water streamed into the street. One by one, little turtle heads appeared next to him. They grasped the edge of the boat like children.
Karen’s legs twitched; they were coming to. The man threw her a rope, intricately knotted to the end. She grabbed hold.
Writer’s Statement
The Pond began as a tale about my childhood neighbors and their missing turtles. It didn't seem to be going anywhere, so I abandoned it until I took a peculiar and inspiring trip to the suburbs of Las Vegas. The Nevada desert's stark otherworldliness seemed just the place to set this story, as it feels mirage-like and mythic— like the endlessly odd work of Joy Williams, Tracy K. Smith, and Aimee Bender. As I began again, I found that The Pond seemed to want to to go someplace beyond reality, so I stopped resisting and just let it run toward the grotesque.
Judge Matthew Baker on “The Pond”
"Like the city in which it’s set, “The Pond” is as colorful and surprising as the strangest of dreams. I wouldn’t know what genre to call it. I wouldn’t know what style to call it. All I know is that I’ve never taken a trip to Las Vegas more memorable than this."
– Matthew Baker, 2020 Prose Judge
about the writer
Zoe Kurland is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in English from Columbia University.