Copper

A Lake Superior Horror

Nookomis had been coughing for three nights, and each time it sounded thinner. When I lifted her in the morning, she weighed nothing at all. The cabin held that sweet smell I remembered from my mother, before she died.

So I paddled out to Michipicoten Island.

I knew the stories. My grandfather had told them to me by the fire, in the voice one uses for truths, not for tales. I murmured no prayer as I slipped the lump into my pouch. I did not want him to hear who I was.

The copper burned in my pouch as I pushed the canoe from the shore. Days lay ahead of me on the water, hugging the coast all the way to Bawating¹, where the trader paid well and asked no questions about where things came from. A long and brutal journey. But for Nookomis it was worth it.

Lake Superior lay still as lead. Too still. No wind, no birds. My paddle sounded too loud in the water, as though it were dragging across something solid.

The island was barely an hour behind me when I smelled copper in the air, where no copper could be. A shadow slid beneath the canoe, too large for a fish, too slow for a current. It followed me without overtaking. The copper in my pouch grew heavier. Warmer. As if it were pulling downward.

Then the water began to boil. Not hot. Cold.

A swelling rose beside the boat, black and endless. At first, I thought a log had surfaced. Then I saw the scales, raised like blades, running in a row along a back that did not end. Horns broke the water, shaped like the antlers of a stag, but something about them was wrong, they tapered too sharply and curved where they should have run straight. Wet feathers clung to the neck, black and heavy, and where they ended, they gave way to fur, which in turn became scales, as though the creature had been assembled from several animals by a hand that did not know where one should stop and the next begin. Last came the eyes, yellow and feline, large as my fists, and they did not look at me the way an animal looks, but the way something looks that has been waiting a long while.

It hissed. The sound was rapids and storm at once, ran through my bones and loosened something inside them.

I threw the copper into the water. It hesitated. For one breath it hung there, as though the choosing were not mine but its own. Then it sank.

Too late.

A paw, broader than my canoe, struck up from the depths at me. Claws like a wildcats, but six on each hand, too long, curved like fish hooks. The tail came last, lashed around the hull, endlessly long, serpentine, and dragged me under.

Water filled my mouth. I looked upward, through the blackness, and the last thing I saw was a lock of my own hair, drifting toward the surface. Toward the sun. Without me.

---

¹Bawating, “Place of the Rapids,” is the name by which the Ojibwa have known, for centuries, that stretch of Lake Superior where the St. Marys River breaks into thundering rapids. French Jesuits founded a mission there in the seventeenth century and called the place Sault Ste. Marie. In the old stories, the roaring and hissing of the Mishipeshu can still be heard in those very rapids.

Author’s note

I’m Sacha, a writer based in Switzerland, currently working on my first full-length novel. Fragments and the Dark is my home for the shorter pieces: stories, fragments, experiments, and a chance to connect with readers who share a taste for the darker corners of fiction.

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Thank you for reading. 🖤