The Stream Nymph

by Howard Brown

The hike up Pebble Creek trail was a bitch, a climb that left the two friends fighting for breath that day in early September of 1986, as well it should, considering they were at around 7000 feet and neither had been in-country long enough to acclimate. Still, they humped the climb without complaint, knowing full-well what lay waiting once they passed the 6k marker, left the trail, and bushwhacked down thru the brush and dead-falls to stream-side.

***

They’d discovered Pebble by accident a few years before, having fished Slough Creek for two days, then heading over Bliss Pass and back down the Pebble Creek trail just to avoid the monotony of coming out of the woods the same way they’d gone in.

At a certain point on that trek, one of them had said, “Okay, let’s see what sort of dinks there are in this little, piss-ant stream.” But to their surprise, the fishing was superb; not exactly the hogs they’d caught in Slough, but healthy enough Cutthroat, and in prodigious numbers. So, when the fishing slowed elsewhere, they always came back to Pebble.

***

And that’s what had brought them back on this particular day. The fishing was every bit as good as they’d anticipated and by two o’clock, they were ready for a break. They ate some lunch, then continued to sit and let time slide, filling the long, pregnant moments with idle talk. There was no rush; they had the whole afternoon out in front of them. And there was the dope they’d scored the night before in a Cooke City bar which they had yet to sample.

It proved to be some heavy-duty weed and after a few tokes they were content to lean back against a fallen log, listen to the murmur of the stream, and watch the banks of cumulus drifting across the autumn sky.

“Jesus,” one of them whispered at length, spotting movement on the far side of the creek. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Looks like a blond chick with a fly rod to me, dude,” the friend replied, coughing as he exhaled a final lung-full of smoke. “And she ain’t wearing nothing but a fucking fly-vest and a pair of Tevas.”

“Far out,” the first man added, sotto voce, then called out across the stream, “Having any luck, honey?”

The figure paused, turning. “Haven’t really seen anything worth casting to,” she shot back, as an incredibly long, forked tongue darted out from between her lips and snatched up a moth fluttering just above the surface of the water.

***

In all the years that followed, the two friends reminisced endlessly about their encounter with this creature, which they came to refer to as the stream nymph. And while they could never quite bring themselves to believe she’d been anything other than a hallucination—a bizarre apparition from a shared dope-dream—they never found the courage to make their way back up the root-bound trail to Pebble Creek again.

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Howard Brown is a retired attorney who lives with his wife, Ann, and wily feline, Stormy, on Lookout Mountain, TN. His short fiction has appeared in Louisiana Literature, F**k Fiction, Crack the Spine, Pulpwood Fiction, Extract(s), Gloom Cupboard, Full of Crow and Pure Slush.