That pool. That goddamn pool.

It had seemed like such an asset when they bought the house 16 years ago. Great for resale, they thought. After all, what kind of masochist wants to buy a house near the southernmost tip of Texas with no swimming pool?

They had enjoyed it for a few years, despite having to frequently shock the water with massive quantities of chemicals to fight off the frequent algae blooms. In truth, it was the dogs who got the most use of the pool. From the time they were puppies, Corky and Roper would happily retrieve any floating object their humans tossed into the pool for them. Corky occasionally appeared at the door to the back patio, soaked to the bone and smelling of wet fur and chlorine. Having decided to take an unsupervised dip to cool off, he’d then spin in impatient circles and shake water from his thick Aussie coat as he sought entry back into the house.

That lasted for a few years. Then the cracks began to appear.

At first they could scarcely be seen. The only sign of anything amiss was a modest spike in their monthly water bill from the city. In time, though, the cracks in the pool’s concrete shell lengthened and widened until they could no longer be ignored. The prognosis from the pool techs that came out to inspect the situation were grim: spend thousands of dollars for a repair that would have no guarantee of holding, or excavate the swimming pool and rebuild it from scratch.

Zeke had already dipped into his paltry retirement funds, incurring some sizable penalties. That had been to redo the roof after the greedy shit-picklers at the insurance company denied their perfectly legit hail damage claim. They redid the floors, too, in a tile that Margot later decided she hated. Nothing like walking across the underripe fruits of your retirement nest egg every day, knowing your partner fantasizes about not just ripping it up but really going medieval on its ass — Tarantino meets HGTV’s Fixer Upper. Probably replace it with some kind of exotic stone with a price tag suggesting it was unearthed by Durin and the dwarves of Khazad-dûm.

Zeke couldn’t recall if it was he or Margot who suggested they drain the pool, but it had seemed like a good option at the time. Certainly better than continuing to throw good money after bad at the problem. As the dogs got older and Corky’s honey-colored eyes became clouded with cataracts, his footing became less sure and he’d taken a nasty tumble over the edge of the pool into the smooth shell of that unforgiving concrete basin. There were no obvious injuries, but he was never quite the same afterward, and the previously sluggish decline of old age gained cruel momentum.

Zeke and Margot erected a makeshift fence around the rim of the pool to prevent further mishaps. It was nowhere near sturdy enough to prevent a 45-pound dog from crashing headlong through it, but it did its job to help the dogs reorient themselves when they got too close to that perilous edge.

Over time, even the infrequent rainfall of the latest South Texas drought managed to deposit a few inches of water in the otherwise empty swimming pool. And in the span of a few seasons, live oak and mesquite leaves and other organic debris settled in the basin, forming a thin but hospitable layer of soil. It was in this fertile medium that the reeds began to appear. Almost overnight, it seemed, a dense thicket erupted in the deep end of the pool. Green lances 8-10 feet tall huddled tightly together, clones linked through a network of rhizomes.

Zeke had learned that this tall grass now squatting in his pool was likely descended from accidental stowaways — forbears swept into the ballast holds of European ships in the late 18th or early 19th centuries and then transported to the Americas. Fucking ballast holds, he thought. Basically a wet dream for the invasive species of the world.

Zeke was nearly 48 now as he mused on all this, peering deeply into the shadows of the reeds while Roper the dog stiffly shambled around the concrete pool deck, sniffing the air for some ethereal sign of an ideal shitting spot. Insects hummed and chittered in the thick, waist-high grass of the long neglected yard. Frogs flirted lustily in their alien language, casually coupling and uncoupling among the reeds in an amphibious orgy that begged for a David Attenborough voiceover. What was left of Corky resided on Zeke’s nightstand in a metal box embossed with a syrupy platitude about a rainbow bridge. Zeke’s mom had died just a few months after Corky, and Zeke often lay awake at night thinking of them, listening to a looped recording he’d made of Corky snoring peacefully in his lap a few weeks before the pooch had died. The man loved them both but had to admit, with much guilt, that Corky was the one he missed more.

At least they still had Roper, he thought, as the arthritic dog grazed on some of the grass beside the patio. What little light dispelled the gloom spilled over into the backyard as a lazy, sallow glow from a lone streetlamp in the new subdivision on the other side of the fence. A gentle breeze stirred the dry fronds of the queen palm that reigned over the pool deck. Clinging to its trunk was a lone palmetto bug — a two-inch-long cockroach apparently trying to rebrand to something less cockroachy. From inside the house came the muffled sound of a screeching dragon as Margot binge-watched Game of Thrones, trying to catch up to Zeke so they could enjoy the season finale together.

A mosquito buzzed in Zeke’s ear and then landed just above his right eyebrow. Before he knew what he was doing, he swatted at it and slapped his glasses off his face. The smooth black acetate frames that he meticulously cleaned every day with a microfiber cloth went skidding across the rough pool deck into the shadows.

“Fucking shitdicks!”

Roper, despite being mostly deaf now at age 14, abruptly looked up from his business meeting with Mr. Brown to see what the fuss was about. He sniffed the air, adjusted his arched stance slightly, and dropped two more nuggets on the pool deck.

Not wanting to step on his glasses while searching for them, Zeke got down on all fours and crawled gingerly in the general direction they had gone. Thank you, sweet baby jesus on a snowmobile, he thought, grateful for the privacy of his backyard. An obese middle-age man suddenly slapping his glasses off his own face, screaming barely sensical profanity into the night, and then crawling around in threadbare boxers and a sweat-stained T-shirt was not an image he wanted to go public.

His knees protested their abuse, and just as he was about to give up the search for the night, the fingers of his left hand closed around the errant glasses. Zeke rolled over into a sitting position on the pool deck, gently feeling the contours of the glasses and squinting at them in the dim glow of the distant streetlamp.

His fingers were stroking the newly roughened surface of the acetate when the sudden silence doused him like a bucket of ice water. All the frogs and insects were mute. Even the rustling palm fronds seemed to have gone silent. No faint TV drone from inside the house. No faraway thrum of traffic on the expressway. No faint buzz of planes taking off and landing at the small municipal airport a few miles away. No barking dogs or yowling cats in the distance. Complete stillness.

Zeke donned the scuffed glasses just in time to see Roper standing at attention, so completely motionless he could have been mistaken for taxidermy were it not for the curl of his lips into a silent snarl. In that moment, with his gaze firmly locked on a point in the hollow shell of the pool, geriatric Roper was as alert as he’d ever been.

The hairs rose on the back of Zeke’s neck. His butthole clenched and his testicles retracted. His skin broke out in goosebumps even as the outdoor temperature still hovered around 90 degrees. An icy snake burrowed into his chest and coiled tightly around his heart. He followed Roper’s gaze into the reeds. A series of three slow squelching sounds broke the silence. Not the subdued plop of a frog or other small creature crawling through the muck. No, this was more like the phlegmy sucking noise wader boots make when hiking across a mudflat. The reeds rustled as something unseen crept among their shadows.

Zeke’s jaw cramped with the force of his clenching. He gnashed the inside of his left cheek and tasted metal as blood flowed from the wound.

From within the reeds came a low vibration that reminded him of a YouTube video he’d once seen of Tuvan throat singing. Very slowly it rose in pitch until it morphed into a chittering unlike anything he’d ever heard.

CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CH-CH-CH-CH-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch ………………..

Then complete stillness again. Zeke heard only his own ragged, shallow breaths and the rush of blood in his ears like white noise. Pregnant beads of sweat punctuated his brow and rivulets coursed from his armpits and streamed over his love handles. Salt stung his eyes and he squeezed them shut reflexively. Zeke opened them just in time to see two glowing orbs peering out of the reeds. Amber eyes seemingly floating in space not inches from the pool floor but at least two meters from it.

Zeke had just enough time to sense a cunning intelligence behind those eyes and then they were gone without a sound, swallowed up by the shadows. Seconds later the backyard erupted in night sounds as suddenly as if someone had toggled off the mute button. Frogs resumed their orgy in the bowels of the pool. Insects hummed in the overgrown yard. A train sounded its horn in the distance. Indistinct pop music spilled out of a pickup truck idling in a neighbor’s driveway. Palm fronds swished and shushed in the breeze. Zeke’s knees crackled as he stood up. Roper nuzzled his leg and huffed to signal he was ready to go back inside.

Later, as Zeke lay beside Margot in their bed and listened to her familiar snoring, sleep would not come. Each time his lids closed and he began floating down into oblivion, those amber eyes met him there, unblinking, gazing out at him from the murk. Somewhere below those eyes, Zeke knew, was a slavering maw, a gaping ulcer greedy with eons of unabated hunger, radiating steamy breath that reeked of spoiled peaches and sun-ripened fish. There would be teeth, too. So many teeth. Arrayed in drunken rows like jagged shards of tempered glass, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to pierce and slice and rend.

Margot stirred beside Zeke and mumbled in her sleep. He looked over at her fondly and thought how fortunate he was, how she deserved so much better from him. He vowed to try the fluvoxamine again and book a follow-up telehealth visit with the psychologist. He’d have to finish reading that Viktor Frankl book first, he mused. Dr. Mordant was sure to ask him about it, and Zeke didn’t want to have to lie again.

The sun would be coming up in a few hours, and the faithful would begin piling into their cars and heading off to morning worship services. Zeke planned to sleep in if he could manage to drift off. Maybe this would be the day he finally unboxed the rowing machine he’d purchased three years prior. Margot would be delighted to find it finally set up and ready to use in the spare bedroom upstairs that used to be Baba’s.

Zeke could hear Roper in the hallway, running in his sleep, his claws scratching at the baseboard. A very good boy. Roper raced through his doggie dreamscape and let out two exuberant yelps. Zeke felt a deep, aching pang of sadness. Roper never barked during his waking hours anymore — not since his hearing had mostly gone. Only when under the thrall of a dream did the sweet old rascal recover his voice.

Zeke closed his eyes and felt himself melting into a gelatinous slumber.

“From the reeds,” he whispered to no one in particular.

From the reeds, from the reeds, from the rrrrrrrrrreeeeeeddddddssssssss ……………. RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrooooooowwwwwww ……… CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CH-CH-CH-CH-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch ……….

Two amber eyes snapped open in the gloom. Black, felted tassels of tongue undulated like a tangle of tapeworms and slithered across a thousand sharp, glassy teeth. The barely remembered scent of manflesh perfumed the air. A necrotic tumor that might once have been a stomach quivered eagerly.

RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrooooooowwwwwww ……… CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CH-CH-CH-CH-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch ……….

That pool. That goddamn pool.

It had seemed like such an asset when they bought the house 16 years ago. Great for resale, they thought. After all, what kind of masochist wants to buy a house near the southernmost tip of Texas with no swimming pool?

They had enjoyed it for a few years, despite having to frequently shock the water with massive quantities of chemicals to fight off the frequent algae blooms. In truth, it was the dogs who got the most use of the pool. From the time they were puppies, Corky and Roper would happily retrieve any floating object their humans tossed into the pool for them. Corky occasionally appeared at the door to the back patio, soaked to the bone and smelling of wet fur and chlorine. Having decided to take an unsupervised dip to cool off, he’d then spin in impatient circles and shake water from his thick Aussie coat as he sought entry back into the house.

That lasted for a few years. Then the cracks began to appear.

At first they could scarcely be seen. The only sign of anything amiss was a modest spike in their monthly water bill from the city. In time, though, the cracks in the pool’s concrete shell lengthened and widened until they could no longer be ignored. The prognosis from the pool techs that came out to inspect the situation were grim: spend thousands of dollars for a repair that would have no guarantee of holding, or excavate the swimming pool and rebuild it from scratch.

Zeke had already dipped into his paltry retirement funds, incurring some sizable penalties. That had been to redo the roof after the greedy shit-picklers at the insurance company denied their perfectly legit hail damage claim. They redid the floors, too, in a tile that Margot later decided she hated. Nothing like walking across the underripe fruits of your retirement nest egg every day, knowing your partner fantasizes about not just ripping it up but really going medieval on its ass — Tarantino meets HGTV’s Fixer Upper. Probably replace it with some kind of exotic stone with a price tag suggesting it was unearthed by Durin and the dwarves of Khazad-dûm.

Zeke couldn’t recall if it was he or Margot who suggested they drain the pool, but it had seemed like a good option at the time. Certainly better than continuing to throw good money after bad at the problem. As the dogs got older and Corky’s honey-colored eyes became clouded with cataracts, his footing became less sure and he’d taken a nasty tumble over the edge of the pool into the smooth shell of that unforgiving concrete basin. There were no obvious injuries, but he was never quite the same afterward, and the previously sluggish decline of old age gained cruel momentum.

Zeke and Margot erected a makeshift fence around the rim of the pool to prevent further mishaps. It was nowhere near sturdy enough to prevent a 45-pound dog from crashing headlong through it, but it did its job to help the dogs reorient themselves when they got too close to that perilous edge.

Over time, even the infrequent rainfall of the latest South Texas drought managed to deposit a few inches of water in the otherwise empty swimming pool. And in the span of a few seasons, live oak and mesquite leaves and other organic debris settled in the basin, forming a thin but hospitable layer of soil. It was in this fertile medium that the reeds began to appear. Almost overnight, it seemed, a dense thicket erupted in the deep end of the pool. Green lances 8-10 feet tall huddled tightly together, clones linked through a network of rhizomes.

Zeke had learned that this tall grass now squatting in his pool was likely descended from accidental stowaways — forbears swept into the ballast holds of European ships in the late 18th or early 19th centuries and then transported to the Americas. Fucking ballast holds, he thought. Basically a wet dream for the invasive species of the world.

Zeke was nearly 48 now as he mused on all this, peering deeply into the shadows of the reeds while Roper the dog stiffly shambled around the concrete pool deck, sniffing the air for some ethereal sign of an ideal shitting spot. Insects hummed and chittered in the thick, waist-high grass of the long neglected yard. Frogs flirted lustily in their alien language, casually coupling and uncoupling among the reeds in an amphibious orgy that begged for a David Attenborough voiceover. What was left of Corky resided on Zeke’s nightstand in a metal box embossed with a syrupy platitude about a rainbow bridge. Zeke’s mom had died just a few months after Corky, and Zeke often lay awake at night thinking of them, listening to a looped recording he’d made of Corky snoring peacefully in his lap a few weeks before the pooch had died. The man loved them both but had to admit, with much guilt, that Corky was the one he missed more.

At least they still had Roper, he thought, as the arthritic dog grazed on some of the grass beside the patio. What little light dispelled the gloom spilled over into the backyard as a lazy, sallow glow from a lone streetlamp in the new subdivision on the other side of the fence. A gentle breeze stirred the dry fronds of the queen palm that reigned over the pool deck. Clinging to its trunk was a lone palmetto bug — a two-inch-long cockroach apparently trying to rebrand to something less cockroachy. From inside the house came the muffled sound of a screeching dragon as Margot binge-watched Game of Thrones, trying to catch up to Zeke so they could enjoy the season finale together.

A mosquito buzzed in Zeke’s ear and then landed just above his right eyebrow. Before he knew what he was doing, he swatted at it and slapped his glasses off his face. The smooth black acetate frames that he meticulously cleaned every day with a microfiber cloth went skidding across the rough pool deck into the shadows.

“Fucking shitdicks!”

Roper, despite being mostly deaf now at age 14, abruptly looked up from his business meeting with Mr. Brown to see what the fuss was about. He sniffed the air, adjusted his arched stance slightly, and dropped two more nuggets on the pool deck.

Not wanting to step on his glasses while searching for them, Zeke got down on all fours and crawled gingerly in the general direction they had gone. Thank you, sweet baby jesus on a snowmobile, he thought, grateful for the privacy of his backyard. An obese middle-age man suddenly slapping his glasses off his own face, screaming barely sensical profanity into the night, and then crawling around in threadbare boxers and a sweat-stained T-shirt was not an image he wanted to go public.

His knees protested their abuse, and just as he was about to give up the search for the night, the fingers of his left hand closed around the errant glasses. Zeke rolled over into a sitting position on the pool deck, gently feeling the contours of the glasses and squinting at them in the dim glow of the distant streetlamp.

His fingers were stroking the newly roughened surface of the acetate when the sudden silence doused him like a bucket of ice water. All the frogs and insects were mute. Even the rustling palm fronds seemed to have gone silent. No faint TV drone from inside the house. No faraway thrum of traffic on the expressway. No faint buzz of planes taking off and landing at the small municipal airport a few miles away. No barking dogs or yowling cats in the distance. Complete stillness.

Zeke donned the scuffed glasses just in time to see Roper standing at attention, so completely motionless he could have been mistaken for taxidermy were it not for the curl of his lips into a silent snarl. In that moment, with his gaze firmly locked on a point in the hollow shell of the pool, geriatric Roper was as alert as he’d ever been.

The hairs rose on the back of Zeke’s neck. His butthole clenched and his testicles retracted. His skin broke out in goosebumps even as the outdoor temperature still hovered around 90 degrees. An icy snake burrowed into his chest and coiled tightly around his heart. He followed Roper’s gaze into the reeds. A series of three slow squelching sounds broke the silence. Not the subdued plop of a frog or other small creature crawling through the muck. No, this was more like the phlegmy sucking noise wader boots make when hiking across a mudflat. The reeds rustled as something unseen crept among their shadows.

Zeke’s jaw cramped with the force of his clenching. He gnashed the inside of his left cheek and tasted metal as blood flowed from the wound.

From within the reeds came a low vibration that reminded him of a YouTube video he’d once seen of Tuvan throat singing. Very slowly it rose in pitch until it morphed into a chittering unlike anything he’d ever heard.

CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CH-CH-CH-CH-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch ………………..

Then complete stillness again. Zeke heard only his own ragged, shallow breaths and the rush of blood in his ears like white noise. Pregnant beads of sweat punctuated his brow and rivulets coursed from his armpits and streamed over his love handles. Salt stung his eyes and he squeezed them shut reflexively. Zeke opened them just in time to see two glowing orbs peering out of the reeds. Amber eyes seemingly floating in space not inches from the pool floor but at least two meters from it.

Zeke had just enough time to sense a cunning intelligence behind those eyes and then they were gone without a sound, swallowed up by the shadows. Seconds later the backyard erupted in night sounds as suddenly as if someone had toggled off the mute button. Frogs resumed their orgy in the bowels of the pool. Insects hummed in the overgrown yard. A train sounded its horn in the distance. Indistinct pop music spilled out of a pickup truck idling in a neighbor’s driveway. Palm fronds swished and shushed in the breeze. Zeke’s knees crackled as he stood up. Roper nuzzled his leg and huffed to signal he was ready to go back inside.

Later, as Zeke lay beside Margot in their bed and listened to her familiar snoring, sleep would not come. Each time his lids closed and he began floating down into oblivion, those amber eyes met him there, unblinking, gazing out at him from the murk. Somewhere below those eyes, Zeke knew, was a slavering maw, a gaping ulcer greedy with eons of unabated hunger, radiating steamy breath that reeked of spoiled peaches and sun-ripened fish. There would be teeth, too. So many teeth. Arrayed in drunken rows like jagged shards of tempered glass, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to pierce and slice and rend.

Margot stirred beside Zeke and mumbled in her sleep. He looked over at her fondly and thought how fortunate he was, how she deserved so much better from him. He vowed to try the fluvoxamine again and book a follow-up telehealth visit with the psychologist. He’d have to finish reading that Viktor Frankl book first, he mused. Dr. Mordant was sure to ask him about it, and Zeke didn’t want to have to lie again.

The sun would be coming up in a few hours, and the faithful would begin piling into their cars and heading off to morning worship services. Zeke planned to sleep in if he could manage to drift off. Maybe this would be the day he finally unboxed the rowing machine he’d purchased three years prior. Margot would be delighted to find it finally set up and ready to use in the spare bedroom upstairs that used to be Baba’s.

Zeke could hear Roper in the hallway, running in his sleep, his claws scratching at the baseboard. A very good boy. Roper raced through his doggie dreamscape and let out two exuberant yelps. Zeke felt a deep, aching pang of sadness. Roper never barked during his waking hours anymore — not since his hearing had mostly gone. Only when under the thrall of a dream did the sweet old rascal recover his voice.

Zeke closed his eyes and felt himself melting into a gelatinous slumber.

“From the reeds,” he whispered to no one in particular.

From the reeds, from the reeds, from the rrrrrrrrrreeeeeeddddddssssssss ……………. RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrooooooowwwwwww ……… CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CH-CH-CH-CH-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch ……….

Two amber eyes snapped open in the gloom. Black, felted tassels of tongue undulated like a tangle of tapeworms and slithered across a thousand sharp, glassy teeth. The barely remembered scent of manflesh perfumed the air. A necrotic tumor that might once have been a stomach quivered eagerly.

RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrooooooowwwwwww ……… CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CHUH-CH-CH-CH-CH-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch ……….