The metal detector brought him here the first time.
Coleen, his ex-wife had given him the Equinox 600 for his birthday.
Two years after their divorce.
Said she saw it, thought of him, picked it up on sale.
There wasn’t a ripple in the pond today.
At first, Frankie Boudreau called it the Miracle Pond, but that was an overstatement.
He had been combing urban ruins with the EQ Six, found some decent stuff, just interesting, nothing of great value. Silver pen Edward Piersomething got for his retirement after 40 years at Somethingdyne Industries. The engraving was worn away.
The pond he found, just north of the freeway was in the rubble of the old Cherven Gasket plant.
Maybe one of the execs had it installed to look at from his office window, but it didn’t seem to belong among the crumbled and partially bulldozed brick and glass-block.
The whole area had a motor oil smell, though the gaskets had spit out of the presses clean at Cherven and didn’t touch oil until they were under the hood of an overheating GM vehicle.
Close to the pond, you could get a little whiff of sulfur, but maybe that was industrial too. Frankie wasn’t sure.
Frankie didn’t like the pond for the nature, per se. He liked nature, animals, purple flowers, thick trees, he just wasn’t one of those people who memorized the names of everything.
He liked the pond for two reasons: It was a fuck you to all the rust and cement and forgotten commerce around it, and because it was the only water he could sit near that wasn’t surrounded by suburban kids with paddleboards or old black ladies screaming at their grandkids to not drown.
Often he came without the EQ Six.
Just walked straight to the pond, to the solitude.
He was pretty sure there was a muskrat in it, or maybe just one very aquatic city rat.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t swimming today.
No ripples.
Maybe the earth was absorbing the pond.
Frankie wasn’t sure how that worked.
Erosion? Osmosis? Something like that.
Something was at the edge of the pond across from him.
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