By Parker M. O'Neill

Dad is driving out to the swamp again. Loads the Elantra up with empty camping jugs and boxes of coffee cups and hits the road; bet you’re glad that you hid that tracker in his trunk. By the time you catch up to him he’s on his knees in the mud scooping silty brown liquid into a travel mug. There’s something in the water at home, he’s shouting, this is the only clean source left. No, man, you think, there’s something in the water here, it’s a goddamn swamp. He looks right at you and bares yellow-brown muddy teeth before taking another swig.

It takes twenty minutes to get him out of the muck and into the car. You can’t shepherd him and clean everything off at the same time, so you just stuff the camping jugs under a cluster of spider lilies, feeling like a littering asshole. But you’re at your limit. The doctor told you it’d be like this as Dad deteriorates, warned you that someday soon you’d have to hide the keys. But someday soon and right now are so far apart.

In your dreams you wander the rows of cypress trees, bald trunks like the leathery cold hides of gators. Those knees at the base split when you get too close and squeeze, pull you someplace dark and wet. You wake up sweaty, shaken, groping blindly for your vibrating phone, certain that he’s wandered off again. But what the alarm says is this: A BOIL WATER ADVISORY IS IN EFFECT.

The doctor wants you to go along with what Dad says, resist the impulse to correct him. What he has in him is a sickness that neither of you can fully understand. Issues with drinking are common in the later stages, so this might just be the way it goes. You have to keep things as routine as possible: try not to think about the advisory, how the county won’t say what happened at the reservoir, how dad is still refusing to drink from the tap. You buy a case of water bottles and mix in cocoa powder, tell him it’s water from the swamp. But he won’t drink any. He wants to go to the reservoir, he says, and set things straight.

You hide the keys, of course. You don’t know yet that you’re too late to stop what’s in him.

That night, Dad walks. All the way to the reservoir with a handful of others, bare bleeding feet, all, each with sickness in them. They kneel, gnarled and bent like cypress knees, and eight pairs of lips open. Something brown and green and wet surges out through eight mouths, like mud, like alligator weed, long white fingers of spider lilies evident in its coagulating bulk as it shudders and forms. As it sinks to the bottom and out of sight. There is something in the water. Yes, there is. Deep down in the depths of the reservoir, there’s me.

Parker M. O’Neill lives and writes in upstate New York, where he enjoys drinking delicious water from one of the nation’s last uncovered reservoirs. He is a recent winner of the Elegant Literature Award for New Writers, and his fiction can be found in Apex Magazine, Flame Tree Press, Imagine 2200, and elsewhere. Find his socials at https://linktr.ee/parkermoneill