As Ross drew a pair from the safe, he remembered Clete’s offering—a new pair of white socks with a red stripe at the toe—opening the floodgates to his childhood fascination after so many years. He had worn a brand new pair of white socks nearly every day since. He had had to be somewhat acrobatic in the logistics. Having an Amazon subscription to socks on tap wasn’t exactly justifiable given their financial reality. Ross had created a separate account just for this reason, and his bi-monthly shipment was delivered to the Kline & Sons office. It was the only secret he had kept from Helene. Money aside, there was just no easy explanation for the habit.

Ross withdrew his feet from his boots and looked in sad distaste at the socks from that morning. Once brilliant and fluffy, they already looked crumpled and dismal with rusty streaks from where the tannins had leached from the moist leather. Peeling them off, he cast the wadded rejects into the clothes hamper and drew a deep breath as he slid on each of the virgin socks. Though the ritual was nearly a decade old, Ross still harbored a fear with each repetition that the intoxication would be less potent, that the thrill would have been blunted by over-familiarity. But as proven time and time again, the sensation of the fluted shaft expanding for its first time to surround his foot in a cool, soft embrace was met with untold satisfaction. He briefly ran his hand over the neat rows of stitches that stretched across him like a minuscule, albino cornfield before returning to Earth, where Helene and an impatient dog were pacing outside.

In a time-perfected dance, Ross removed a used pair of socks from the dresser drawer, which he jammed to the bottom of the kitchen trash bin beneath blackened banana peels and the collapsed carton of a frozen lasagna. As one pair of socks entered the hamper, another left the house. The rotation was constant. If Helene had ever noticed that the socks she folded in the laundry never seemed to wear out, she had not said anything. Ross gave his boot laces one last check, adjusted the cuff of his jeans, and stepped outside.

---

Glassdene Lake hadn’t actually been a lake for at least twenty years. Once a reservoir created by the damming of Scotchdale Creek, the lake had been a small, kidney-shaped body of water dotted with cottages on one side and railroad line on the other. The decommissioning of the railway and the eventual draining of the lake left the land scarred with vestiges of a bygone era. Decaying remnants of the once charming lake houses tumbled down on vine-covered slopes. Along the gravely path that Ross and Helene walked—the old rail bed—the twisted creosote covered ties could be seen amongst jagged tangles of wild roses and and the threatening tendrils of poison ivy. The odd scrap of ironworks, orange rust scarcely discernible from the ground itself, pointed gnarled fingers at them as if in silent accusation for their protracted degradation.
As the wooded path was surrounded on both sides brambles and undergrowth, fast greening as they eagerly drank up the longer days, the three were immersed in complete solitude. Cheyenne was let off her lead, and she plodded a few paces ahead, head own, tail curved and swaying like a copper scythe. Helene glanced at her wrist. “Over 11,000 steps,” she said proudly. The simple statement was jarring after minutes of nothing but crunching footsteps and birdsong. Ross nodded.

“What’s it supposed to be?”

“At least 10,000 a day.”

Ross’ boot came in contact with what looked like a chunk of charcoal. It skittered ahead of them and disappeared into a patch of mayapples, which quivered like half-raised beach umbrellas in a storm. “I probably do that a day.”

Helene glanced over at him. His body hadn’t been immune to time, but it had weathered him differently—he might have been broader than his days on the high school football team, but certainly not softer. The statement plucked a nerve, which vibrated through Helene. “Well, you’d certainly need to be more intentional about it if you’d get that manager job. Not spending as much time on your feet, I mean.” Ross kept silent, not taking the bait. He was well aware of her disappointment with their lives. The manager job was a considerable bump in pay. But it also promised to be markedly dull compared to challenges that came with being a technician. He felt Helene tense beside him, as if preparing further provocation, when trees rang with the unmistakeable trumpet of a Canada goose and the powerful beating of wings.

Ross and Helene looked to the west in unison, where a glimmer of sunset on water poked through the screen of tender leaves. But before either knew what was happening, Cheyenne’s ears swiveled forward and she bounded off the trail toward the sound, saplings thrashing in her wake.
Helene shouted futilely after her as Ross exhaled gustily. “Should have had her on the leash, I guess,” he groaned as he stepped from the worn path. Instead of looking at him in outrage, she shot him a pained look.

“I thought…there’s no one else down here. I didn’t think—” she stammered. She put a hand to her forehead as Ross snapped away a branch barring his progress toward the lake. “What should I do?” she called after him. He turned to face her, the crunching of the dead leaves beneath his feet filling the distance between them.

“It’ll be fine, honey. Cheyenne knows where home is,” he said smoothly, though it felt like a lie. “Head further down the trail and call for her. I’m sure she’ll be moving along the lakeside. Helene nodded and began to puff down through the alley of trees and out of sight. Ross shook his head. “Damn dog,” he muttered as he pushed on through the undergrowth and down the slope.

What was left of Glassdene Lake was a graceful, half-mile bend in the Scotchdale Creek that spread out over a shallow basin, widening into almost a stagnant pool of murky water that lapped around the odd chunk of granite. As Ross stepped into the clearing, the day’s last light fainted off the rippling surface. To the south, he could hear the faint roar of the creek as it funneled back into a narrow, swiftly flowing sinuous channel through a meadow and toward the twin ridges of the old earthen damn.

“Cheyenne!” He shouted through cupped hands, hearing his voice skim the mud-brown surface of the water and slap lightly off the opposite bank. The derelict cottages stared back at him with gaping windowless holes. The honking of the geese echoed from further up the lake, around the bend and out of view. He trudged through the masses of dried marsh grasses that had been laid over by the winter. It was like walking on a thatched roof. Here and there, the ground was criss-crossed by the ruts of ATVs, their water-filled tracks mirroring the dusk sky.

As Ross trudged along the water’s edge, shouting the dog’s name with declining enthusiasm, he began to detect that the ground was unsure beneath his boots. The matted reeds were shifting and compressing significantly under his tread, and brown water bubbled up in his footprints. “Where the hell is that dog?” he grumbled just as his boot found a particularly soft spot and disappeared between the tangled debris on the bank. A wet cold finger drew across the outside edge of his foot, permeating his sock. “Aw, shit,” he muttered, extracting his foot and finding the bottom half of his boot gleaming with watery clay. “Cheyenne!” his voice was elevating to a scream.

He squatted down and pulled at his slippery laces, the ooze transferring to his fingers like melting chocolate ice cream. He wrenched the tongue back and withdrew his foot, surveying the coffee-colored stain sullying the otherwise brilliant white sock. He cursed the dog again as his thrust his foot back into the sodden boot, the force of which drove it back out of sight with a wet smack. Ross reeled back, registering that his other boot seemed to be slowly sliding beneath the surface as well. He stood quickly, suddenly understanding what the carpet of dead reeds he had blundered onto had been concealing: an expanse that both the lake and solid ground competed for—and the result was that it was neither and both. He was standing in the middle of a gelatinous bog with unknown depths, and nothing more than some dried blades of grass were keeping the soles of his boots from plunging through.

His heart echoed the beating of the unseen goose wings, slamming into his ribs as if to escape. Ross glimpsed a nearby parting of branches at the tree line like a shadowy cave. It was only a few steps away. Cheyenne temporarily forgotten, he gingerly picked his way across the mat. He could hear the chorus of tiny bubbles erupting from all around him, a sign that surely he was displacing a large area of water by treading here.

Five or six feet from the first tips of the tree branches his foot broke through, this time the other. A hollow “thwock” issued from below as his leg disappeared past the cuff of his dark jeans in a cascade of slurry that suddenly materialized. “Damn!” he exhaled in a tight gasp. He jerked free and continued toward the opening, small green shoots emerging from the thicket floor and waving in a soft breeze as if cheering him on. He could feel his sock grow thick with mud and gurgle against the inside of its leather container with each step.

He ducked his head beneath the first branch and let out a shuddering sigh of relief. He turned and glanced back. The brown waters rippled, dotted with the gleaming green clusters of the first new pond lilies of the season. He shook his head and looked down at his boots, both considerably darker than before. Glassdene Lake: one point. Ross: zero. But he wouldn’t be letting that happen again. No powers on this planet or above would bring him back to this soupy plot of earth again, not even for a dog. He ran his hand over his eyes in sudden exasperation. All of this and he was still without Cheyenne. Damn that dog. He strained for the sounds of the geese or perhaps for a lucky bark, but the corrupted land that had once been Glassdene was silent except for the refrain of the spring peepers. Ross started up the slope through the patch of green shoots.

Nature is adept at deception. From the markings on the spicebush swallowtail caterpillar that fool birds into thinking they have enormous eyes, to the irresistible aroma of the pitcher plant nectar that lure insects to a sticky end, evidence is everywhere that the natural world runs on manipulating its creatures, whether to draw them in or repel them. We can’t be entirely sure whose machinations were at work that lulled Ross into his false sense of relief and security that he had escaped the gluey clutches of Glassdene Lake. But one thing we can all determine with certainty is that the presence of trees does not necessarily the mark of solid ground.

Ross was just thinking about his ruined socks—not that they were bound for anything other than a garbage can anyway—and parting his lips to call yet again for Cheyenne when his right leg disappeared into the ground up to his knee. He windmilled his arms wildly to keep him upright as his brain scrambled to decode the sensory input. Dark viscous mud—the color of semisweet chocolate—churned around his black jeans, pulling the leg taut with a hungry suction as a dark line of damp slowly wicked up the diagonal twill weave. He scrambled to back up, using his left foot to try to leverage himself out of the mess, but the ground here was also soft. It seems that our unfortunate (or truly blessed, if you ask me) friend had stepped straight into a spring, which had been reasonably disguised as sturdy terrain by the surrounding green shoots and a even coat of dead leaves and other forest detritus. He was perched on the edge of a sticky pit, an edge that was rapidly giving way beneath him.

He only had time to hiss a drawn out “shit!” between clenched teeth before his boot slid downward with a crunching of unseen roots and twigs and his left leg had joined right. A metallic bite curled into his nostrils as the sludge rushed to embrace him, spilling over the padded collar of his boots and filling them, climbing beneath his pants up his calves. He stared down at the truncated appearance of his body for a moment, then an unexpected laugh burbled from his throat, startling even him. This was…extraordinary. The mud was cool, but not cold. It was remarkably smooth. He could feel it against his skin and between his toes in his saturated socks. It surrounded him, completely obscured his legs and feet from view. As such, he was suddenly became hyperfocused on every sensation. The pressure as it pushed against the tops of his boots. The bubbles of air trapped and moving beneath the choked denim at his knees. The rounded bump of something solid running beneath the soles of both of his boots just in front of his heels. A tree branch, perhaps, that fell and was long ago ensnared in this ooze?

Ross was surprised at his own curiosity. He swayed and watched the mud undulate, feeling it like a sticky tongue working a little further up his legs. It was true that his beautiful white socks were ruined. Possibly his boots, too. But there was a novel fascination to his knowing that they were all exactly the same color in that moment—his boots, his socks, the cuffs of his jeans, the skin on his legs…they were all a uniform bronze. Why was that so satisfying? The familiar feeling that Ross experienced every time he donned a new pair of dazzling white socks filled him, then overflowed. When there is a fault in an electrical circuit, the voltage can be safely discharged via the ground. Ross’s grounding rod began to twitch and stir for the first time in months. He slid his boots unseen along the slick surface of the branch, wondering what would happen if he stepped off.

So he did.

If his first accidental step into this bog had been like a greedy tug, this was now a determined thrust. His weight drove the bottoms of his boots through thicker strata of gumbo. His disturbance in the spring had churned up the mud, dispersing the leafy pretense of solid ground. It now openly glowed under the dusky sky as it assumed ownership of his thighs, leaving only a small triangle of light between his legs. Ross became aware of a hollow sound, like a breeze rasping over dead leaves. It came in short bursts. It was only after several iterations that he realized it was the sound of his own ragged breath as he panted, slack-jawed. The thrill of giving himself over to the unknown, the unseen, and not having any idea of how to extricate himself swelled. As the swampy earth pressed around him, he pushed back from inside his jeans.

He fumbled at his button and fly to relieve the strain. The first dot of his spontaneous rapture had already soaked through his boxers. How long had it been since his body had been able to respond like this? And with such sudden intensity? He thought of Helene’s hands snaking into his Varsity jacket one October night a dozen years ago, climbing his chest beneath his shirt as he backed her into the crook of a cross brace beneath the bleachers. Their breaths had been silver puffs in the crisp night, intermingling as their bodies began to tangle.

Ross moaned, his body giving a shudder which reverberated though the slurry around his thighs. He had hardly realized that he had jammed his fist into his crotch. Another scene lit up in a different corner of his mind—his friend Tate leaning across the cafeteria table in junior high. “Try to do it without using your hands,” he had said grinning through a sporkful of baked beans. “It’s way better.”
“What else do you use?” Ross had said, immediately feeling stupid for having to ask.

Tate’s grin spread wider like a yolk spilling from a cracked shell. “Aw, come on, brother. I can’t do all the work for you.”

His obnoxious laugh rang in Ross’s ears as though he were standing at the end of the spring, watching him. He pulled his hand from his pants, took a quavery breath, and began to pump his legs, unseen through the muck. Further and further down his boots worked until the muddy spring wetly lapped over his cock. Back and forth he thrust his waist, and the tide of burnished mire pushed and pulled at him through the thin fabric of his shorts. Globules of clay began to collect on the peel of his open fly, parting his jeans further and inviting the bog in. Thick rivulets began to funnel in where they had not yet forced their way up from below. Ross had most definitely never been so messy, and quite possibly never so aroused in his life.

By the time he had worked his way to a frenzied climax, mud was halfway up his belly. But Ross was oblivious. The sludge, which had until now moved between his legs in erotic tease, anchored him as the countless months of unrealized tension split him open. His head lolled forward. He could almost see his reflection in the dark shimmering surface as somewhere below, he added his own seed to the soup.

A light, dry crust was forming at the very edges of the saturated area of his shirt by the time his heart had stopped flopping like a fish out of water and his breathing had stopped coming in gasps. The dark beneath the trees was too now murky for his eyes to penetrate, and the lake at his back was now a soft blue under the twilight. A crackle of twigs signaled movement just beyond the spring. Ross strained in the shadows to make out two eyes and the twin peaks of fuzzy ears, both cocked at a curious angle. Ross chuckled as he began to fish around beneath the slime for purchase on the branch.

It was the damn dog.