I don't know how long the pool has been there. It seems to have always existed, to always

have been laying in wait, waiting for something, or maybe for someone.

It doesn't matter how long it's been since the rain,

it never seems to disappear, or even to get shallower.

It's such a little thing, no more than about 10 feet round with patchy tufts of tall grass piercing the surface.

It must only come up to your ankles, but something about its stillness, it's almost blackluster, its persistent.

In my youth, I never truly believed the thing to be cursed.

I was told it was, and I was afraid for a time but it passed as easily as a dream like many

childhood fears do.

Now as an adult as someone battered and wearied by the world he would think the place held even less meaning.

I flatter myself that it does, usually.

I do not believe in the horsefly king, not in the light of day, but sometimes when the sun sets

over the park and the sanguine glow of it hits the still water in just the right way,

or when the moon is cold and high over it. The place still captures the terror I have not known since

childhood. The memorial park stands on the remains of a World War I battlefield. The barbed wire

has been torn up, the craters from shelling filled in, grass planted in the mud,

and all that remains of the butchery is a plaque in a picturesque little gazebo commemorating the battle.

Sometimes children still find them buried in the earth.

I was a child myself when I first visited the place.

When I first heard the story of the Horse Fly King, it was a pale sickly boy named Nicholas

who first drew my attention to it, wearing a cheeky grin that only little boys and psychopaths can wear.

I once saw him rubber caterpillar open with a nail to see what colour it's inside to her.

...