Brambles tug at my legs. There will be cuts, but that’s the morning’s problem. It’s not like I can feel them, anyway. The temperature has just dipped below freezing, and already the fog is starting to rise. It creeps from the lake, lapping at the banks, at the woods, at my ankles. Lapping like a swollen tongue.

She likes these nights. At least, I think she likes them. This is when she always calls me.

It’s not a long walk, down from the cabin where mummy and daddy sleep; down from the cabin that is home during the school holidays. I’ve heard mum and dad say that the walk is difficult, that the thorns and low branches make it dangerous; they just don’t know how to walk it. They care too much about silly little scrapes and sticky threads of spider webs. It is small, small and narrow, but I have opened a path here over time.

I walk through the underbrush as quickly and as quietly as I can, muttering apologies to the voles whose foraging I disturb, and the owls, whose voles I have scared back to the water.

Something darts between the bushes ahead of me. It’s an otter, I think. I clutch the bulging napkin I carry closer to my chest. It would not do to drop it. She asked me so nicely to bring it. She always asks nicely. At least, at first she does.

I walk quicker now than I used to.

She’s louder than she used to be. She’s louder and more urgent.

She calls me.

She’s hungry.

“Not long now,” I whisper, “I am close.”

The fresh new limbs of a young birch extend across my path, its switches swatting me as I push through. It’s hard work for one with a frame as small and frail as mine, but this is why I can come this way when mummy and daddy can’t. I persist. I persevere. I answer the call.

I near the water.

The fog is still here, sitting atop the water like the foamy bubbles on a bath. It’s calm. It’s quiet. There is no hooting, no rustling, no howling of the wind. Only I am allowed to disturb her. Only I have what she wants.

I kick off my shoes and socks and leave them neatly aligned next to a strip of bark, resting in a dry patch of mud. They will be waiting for me when I get back.

I don’t hesitate. I walk into the water.

The shimmering surface does not crack and ripple. Instead, small mouths open around my calves, sucking on them like giant leeches. They swallow me inch by inch, deeper and deeper, as I move closer to the center of the lake. I cannot see my toes, lost in the bellies of these worms. I see only the white veil of the fog, above and below.

Then I see her.

She’s been crying.

She’s been crying, this girl who looks like me.

Even through the water, I can see her eyes are damp, her cheeks are stained, and her nose drip, drip, drips incessantly. Her mouth is twisted in an ugly grimace of self-pity.

Ugly. So ugly.

“Do you have it?” she snivels.

“Yes,” I mouth back.

“Give it to me! Give it to me, please! I’m hungry. I’m so very hungry!”

I have long stopped pitying her, this girl in the water who looks like me but is not me. I have long stopped feeling responsible for her hunger. Still, she calls to me. She calls to me night after night, year after year, and I know I will come. How can I say no to her, this girl who looks like me?

I gently open up the napkin, and carefully place its contents upon the unbroken surface of the water.

Bread and cheese.

The girl in the water claws at the offering like an animal. It is a graceless lunge. It is desperation, pure desperation. But, this time, just as every other, the bread becomes sodden and swollen, and begins to tip beneath the surface. The thin slices of cheese drift along briefly like wood-rotten rafts, and then they too slip away, deep into the lake. They sink away, far from reach, far from famished mouths and hollow stomachs.

“No! NO!”

The girl in the lake is screaming now. She is screaming and scrabbling for the morsels that are lost to her.

Shouting. Snatching. Crying.

This is all she will do now, I know. This is all she has ever done, ever since that first year. That first year was different. That first year was special. Back then we had so much fun. Back then the pit in her belly was just a nuisance, not a purpose. She was fun back then. She won’t be fun again.

I watch her, this girl in the lake who looks like me, but is not me. I watch her with pitiless eyes as the sun penetrates the deep fog, and bleaches her from existence.

There is no girl in the water now. There is no me staring back at me. Only the white blanket of fog stains the lake.

She will be back tomorrow. That is how it always goes. She will call for me then as she did tonight. It is our routine. Tomorrow we will go through the same useless, sad ritual.

What a burden it must be, I think to myself as I walk the path back to the cabin where mummy and daddy stay.

What a horrible burden it must be, I think to myself as I walk the path back to the cabin where the girl’s mummy and daddy stay.

How awful it must be to need to eat.