Other People's Kids

The Flesh-Naked Fish of Doom

We had a long weekend at the lake after the 4th, and it was really, really cool. The girls are settling in nicely (finally!) and I have several stories to relate, but I'll pace myself and just give you a smallish peek into our weekend.

"Jill" can be a pretty good worker when she gets it into her head to get off her lazy princess butt and do something (not to put too fine a point on it). One day this weekend, she was in the lake swimming and noticed that, well, there are just a hell of a lot of weeds around our dock. This year the weeds must have had a meeting and then went tooling around the lake together until they found their perfect place to grow for the summer, which happens to be the area within a 50-yard radius of our dock. So we're sitting in a weed pit.

"Jill" decided to bust my image of her as a spoiled little brat with a fragile work ethic and actually pull weeds for awhile. And she actually managed to make something of a difference. Until...

I was on the other side of the cabin when I noticed the shock wave from her scream ruffling the leaves in the trees and jostling the clouds just a bit. I ran around the cabin just in time to see the lake settle back within its normal banks, having been raised by the violence of her now-continuous, ear-splitting vocalizations. She flew up the ladder onto the dock and whirled like a dervish up the stairs where she stopped, beating at herself and gibbering uncontrollably but thankfully at less than 120 decibels. It was a little like having the Tazmanian Devil from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons jump out of the lake and buzz up the bank straight at you. Yeek.

Her speech wasn't much clearer than Taz's, either. The only things I was able to discern that she clearly said was something about a fish and "it's bones are sticking out!" Sigh. Since we aren't allowed to start a morphine drip, we had to wait awhile for her to calm down, after which we found out that basically she had been pulling weeds when from the weeds came The Fish Of Doom. A carp that in its livelier days must have weighed in at 6 or 7 pounds, minimum. It was dead enough that some of its body had rotted away and it now weighed maybe 4 or 5 pounds. It looked like it had lost a battle with a boat propeller or something, because part of its flesh was gone and its bones were, indeed, sticking out.

And did it stink. Whew.

The next day, "Jill" carefully checked the entire area and sure enough, the fish had drifted in to shore and maybe 30 yards down the shore from the dock. It seemed to reassure her that at least she knew where it was hiding though, so swimming was okay again. I did notice that she avoided the weeds after that, though. Heh. Too bad. It would have been nice to get some more weeds gone.

Ah, well. Maybe next time, after the terror has worn off and she gets into the same type of mood where she needs something to do. That's a handy feature in a foster kid, I must say.

I'll have more on this weekend later. In the meantime, don't let the fish get you.

Labels: Jill, Lake Cabin

posted by Dan @ 6:03 PM