The artificial lake in our village has always had a slightly unreal quality to it. It sits there like a polished sheet of glass, too neat to feel entirely natural, reflecting the sky while keeping its own secrets just below the surface.
On most days, the water is murky enough that you do not think much about what might be resting at the bottom. But one unusually clear day, something caught my eye. There were clusters of pale shapes scattered across the lakebed, arranged in a way that felt too deliberate to ignore.
From the shore, they looked almost organic. My mind immediately started building a story around them. Maybe they were eggs from some rare amphibian. Maybe an invasive species had found its way into the lake. Maybe, in the overactive way imagination works around still water, it was something nobody had noticed before.
A Mystery Made by Still Water
The longer I looked, the stranger it seemed. The quiet around the lake did not help. There were no ripples, no birds disturbing the surface, no obvious explanation nearby. Just those pale clusters sitting in shallow dips at the bottom.