Like the rest of her family, she’d been bitten and it’d gone downhill from there.

        

Crawling across the grass, she was dragging her legs behind her. No, make that leg, as in one. The left one was completely gone, cut off somewhere around her knee. A large piece of her left side was missing, too. In the mess remaining, her ribs gleamed like pieces of smooth ivory.

         

Something that looked vaguely familiar was trapped behind the

       

 It was her heart. Unmoving, quiet…and dead.

         

She pulled herself toward me, moaning pitifully, her leg and her long blonde hair snagging on the metal edging around the flowerbed as she passed over it, her arms reaching out, her hands digging into the dirt. Her raggedy fingernails were painted blue, the polish chipped, something pink and gooey caught beneath their mangled tips. I didn’t even want to consider where those hands had been.

         

The unmistakable scent of a dead body came to me on the breeze, and I couldn’t contain my cough. She stilled before shifting her direction to tack toward me.

         

I waited for her to draw closer so I could end her miserable existence, then I realized the pool separated us.

         

A moment later, she fell into the water and sunk to the bottom without a bubble. I’d seen it happen before. The nodders couldn’t swim, and they didn’t float so down they went. Eventually, I guessed, the pool would fill up with them, and they’d crawl out again, using each other as steps. If that was the case, I’d worry about it when it happened. If I lived long enough myself.  I looked into its green algae-filled depths.

       

It seemed like karma that water trapped them considering water had gotten us into this fix.

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