Duck Xing
Every good man-made pond in the middle of giga-suburbia has a metric fuckton of ducks.
A man-made pond is just that—man-made. You’d think there would be more to say, but when you strip away all the carefully curated foliage, it’s basically just a giant puddle carved out with machines instead of atrophy and fortified with concrete instead of stone. Sometimes, pipes are built into the foundation, which take in water to spew out of a fountain in the middle of the pond like some great, obnoxious whale blowhole.
It's not all manufactured, though. The HOA bought and released some catfish in it, and there’s probably a spare crawdaddy swimming around, and it definitely has a suspicious excess of ducks. Every good man-made pond in the middle of giga-suburbia has a metric fuckton of ducks. The one across the street from your dad’s Spanish Colonial-inspired suburban apartment complex had about fifty of the stupid things, and they’re cute as hell when you’re like, twelve, but then you start driving, and suddenly they’re waddling their fat little asses into the street right in front of your blindspot. The damn HOA installed a little Duck Xing sign that was like five inches off the ground in some half-hearted bid to acknowledge the problem, but the little fuckers were still walking tail to beak in a straight line across the road, so everyone would have to just stop and watch, helpless. You’d glance at the lane beside yours and the scrawny tech-bro dad in his big shiny truck would throw up his hands and groan a little because, “God damn it, Angela, now we’re going to be late to Ashleigh’s softball practice!” and you’d roll your eyes a little because you know his daughter Ashleigh and she couldn’t give two shits about softball. She’s too busy getting high with her girlfriend behind the cafeteria’s giant industrial dumpsters.
But a lot of people really like the ducks. And you did as well! When you were eight-ish and your dad would take you out to feed them bread and make fun of the ugly ones. Sometimes, people would go out with fishing rods and try their luck. You’d have no idea if they ever actually caught anything, though; it seemed like an impossible task. When you were ten, your dad took you down there, and you watched him climb halfway up a tree to untangle one of the fishing lines that got tossed too far back and snagged a branch. He brought it down, and you two attached tiny pieces of hotdogs to the hook and gently tossed it out into the water. Of course, the line had been cut a little short—it was hard to get it out far—so for the first hour, you didn’t even get a nibble, but then your dad snagged something and yanked out a big ol’ catfish. The success was so startling that you fumbled to take it off the line, and the fish slipped out of your hands and fell onto the dirt. You watched it flop around in the muck—getting dry and dusty like the turkey meat that fell out of your sandwich a half hour prior—before it flopped down the short slope and back into the water, swimming away victorious. Your dad remarked, bemused, that it rescued itself.
Three years later, the HOA put up a sign warning that you should never feed bread to the ducks because it was bad for their health, and something about that made your dad so indignant that he never took you back. Before long, school starts up again, and you forget about the little man-made pond until you’re suddenly sixteen, maneuvering around those God-forsaken, thrice-damned, fatass duck pedestrians wondering where the hell all your childhood joy went.
You turn to the passenger side and tell your dad that you miss being a kid. He tells you to suck it the fuck up and learn how to parallel park already. You want more than anything to hate him for it, but three weeks later, you get a perfect score on your driving test and wonder if sucking it up really was your only shot in hell.
Wyley Fröhlich Jungerman is a queer writer and college student based in San Marcos, Texas. Forever burdened as the eldest son of an eldest daughter, Wyley is obsessed with revealing the rot beneath your hardwood’s veneer. At any given time, you can find him curled up behind the headboard of your grandparents’ four-poster bed, dolefully peeling waterlogged wallpaper from the drywall. His work has appeared here, his mom’s Facebook wall, and nowhere else (yet).
