Many summers ago, there was a lake in Mattie’s backyard. Now a bowl of cracked earth dips from the parched rim. The blank expanse presses on for miles, summer homes abandoned along the shore.

The hulk of an old data processing plant looms above all.

Mattie barely remembers when she used to fish with her grandfather. She was so young, hooking bass and pike, catfish schooling in black clouds beneath their dock.

Once, they sold their catch to visitors. Now only scaleless skeletons bleach white on exposed silt.

Mattie and her grandfather search for once drowned treasures. Sunken sailboats. Old outboards. Half submerged refrigerators. No castoff could possibly surprise Mattie. People dumped what they couldn’t afford to pay for at the town landfill. Others were just bad with boats. The scarred hulls say as much, fiberglass gashes wide enough to slip entire hands inside.

#

Recovered scrap fetches little at the local swap. Just enough to offset weekly food bills, when the market actually has food. With no more salvage, their home garden won’t sustain them through fallow seasons, so they walk on, going further than they ever have before, never resting, Mattie with their rolled tent tethered to her back, Grandpa with his wide-brimmed hat casting his body in shade. He taps his walking stick in time to a song only he can hear.

“What do you think that is?” she asks, pointing across the lakebed to a pitched shape in the distance, hard angles jutting towards the sky.

“Not another boat. Too square,” he replies. “Hopefully there’s money hidden in its guts, whatever it is.”

“I hate when you say guts,” Mattie says. “It makes our work sound gross, or violent. Or…you know what I mean. Just say inside. I hope there’s something good inside.”

“Where’s the fun in that,” Grandpa replies, playfully nudging her with his walking stick.

#

“It’s a house?” Mattie asks, hand shielding her eyes.

“Looks that way.”

The small cottage kneels in the lakebed, swaths of dried mud along its shingled walls. There’s a hole in the roof where snapping turtles once entered. It’s simple and square, the frame collapsing into its watery second home. To Mattie, it looks haunted, a remnant from an unfamiliar world. The building sends gooseflesh shivering down her arms, her body contradicting the summer heat.

“How does a tiny house end up in the middle of a lake?” she asks when they near the front door.

“Easy. Someone tried to float it across. You exhaust your farmland on one side. Trade it for fertile soil on the other.”

“Why not just build a new house?” Mattie asks.

“Do you know how much material goes into building a house? You wouldn’t remember, but back then, yes, we still had plenty of decent wood, but those prices, God, cheaper to float.”

“It’s days like this I miss the water.”

“I hate when you miss the water,” Grandpa replies, smiling. “Really brings down the mood.”

“Noted,” Mattie says, struggling to pull open the door. The handle comes away in her hand, forcing her to break the soft wood apart.

Inside, the dimensions are like their cabin’s, just hollowed, sagging in all the wrong places. Broken floorboards. The old sink in the corner rusted red. A chimney pipe droops from the roofline to a hearth lacking a stove. The cabin is devoid of the comforts they have accumulated. The hand-upholstered couch. The solar-powered vid screen. The throw blankets her mother knit before the Blight. Someone once lived inside the cabin’s confines, but all signs of life had been stripped away.

Grandpa ducks in behind her, removing his sunhat. He stares into the rafters, eyes tracing the empty expanse of the gutted building. He runs a hand over the nearest wall, smile returning.

“What’s there to be happy about? Besides the pipes, it’s a bust,” Mattie says, hands attempting to deconstruct the corroded plumbing. The connecting wall is soft to the touch.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Grandpa replies. “Haven’t you always wanted a vacation home?”

“What’s a vacation home?” Mattie asks. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. We have our tent. We don’t have time for…”

“We have a summer cottage, is what we have. Multiple home owners,” Grandpa says, letting out a deep, rolling laugh. “Did you ever think you’d be part of high society?”

Mattie’s head swivels, gaze passing over the bare, broken walls. “I wouldn’t call this high society.”

“You and your lack of imagination,” Grandpa says, easing himself to the floor. “We’ve got ourselves a little luxury. Count your blessings.”

Mattie has never had a moment's rest.

Not since before her parents passed away.

Not since most people’s parents passed away.

The cabin is cool compared to the elements outside. It holds some ghost scent of fresh water, the whisper of times not so hard, times when people could still float a house across a lake to better lands, to a future not so hollowed-out and ravaged by their past decisions. She wonders what it was like to truly believe in better. How it was a reality for her grandfather when he was her age.

Mattie gives a little laugh.

What even is a lake anymore beyond an extinct word?

She drops her bag and moves to the pipes once again. She gives a solid tug on the rusting fixture and the wall comes with it, leaving a gaping window onto the cracked expanse of old lake, the miles of fractaled earth and small skeletons curving into dusk. The temporary portal only holds for a moment. With the structural wound comes further collapse. The entire wall gives, crashing backward into the lakebed in a cloud of rising dust.

Startled, Grandpa hurries to his feet, brushing the risen dirt from his eyes in frustration.

“I count my blessings,” Mattie says to the empty cabin, stepping through the vacant wall, returning to the only dying world she’s ever known. “Like our tent. I’ll be setting it up out here if you need me.”

© 2026 Corey Farrenkopf