Summer Ghosts

The lake town looks exactly the same, which feels impossible. The same sun-bleached docks. The same cicada buzz. The same endless shimmer of heat over the water. Even the same red canoe, gently rocking against its rope as if someone left it tied up yesterday.

She expects the memories to hit all at once—the laughter, the sunburns, the taste of metal from the old water pump. But instead there’s a hollowness, like the town is waiting for her to start remembering before it exhales. Even the air feels heavy, thick with damp heat and something she can’t quite name. Grief? Nostalgia? No… something else.

Emily stands at her grandmother’s porch, inhaling aromas of wild mint and gasoline—scents that shouldn’t still linger after all these years. No one lived here anymore, so Emily took advantage of coming every summer, even if she was the only one left.

Inside, dust lies thick on the floorboards, but the house feels…occupied. Watched. A floorboard creaks behind her.

“Welcome home,” a voice calls from outside. A neighbor she barely remembers waves too enthusiastically. “Haven’t seen you in ages, kiddo.”

Kiddo. She hasn’t been twelve in decades. Then she realizes he was waving to a child behind her.

As she unpacks boxes, a soft humming threads through the open windows. A melody she hasn’t heard since that summer.

Her chest tightens—June’s song.

She follows the sound down toward the dock, gravel sticking to her bare feet the way it used to when they’d run to the water with dripping popsicles. The humming cuts off the second she reaches the shore.

The lake is perfectly still, like it’s holding its breath. “Humph,” she says as she turns back towards the house.

She finds the box in the hall closet, buried under blankets. SUMMER 2002 is scrawled across the lid. Inside are pictures—her and June grinning with gap teeth, legs kicked over the dock, messy ponytails, and scraped knees.

But in every photo, June’s face is a little smeared. A little off. Like the camera lens couldn’t focus on her, in the last photo, the distortion is worse—and Emily’s own reflection in the lake behind her looks…wrong. Smiling too widely. Eyes too dark and sunken.

A scribble on the back reads: Last day.

Her stomach drops. “I remember…” she whispers. “We were swimming. And then—”

But the memory fogs, blurs, slips from her.

As she moves through the house, lights flicker with a slow, deliberate hum. More than once, Emily catches movement in her peripheral vision—a shadow slipping through a doorway, the sway of a curtain with no breeze. She tells herself old houses make old noises. But this one feels… alert. Listening.

That night, the house settles like a long exhale. She can’t sleep. She dreams of cold hands around her ankles. Water closing over her head. A girl screaming her name—June’s voice cracking, panicked—

She wakes abruptly to find herself standing on the dock. Barefoot. Nightgown dripping lake water.

June is there. Sitting at the end of the dock, cross-legged in the moonlight, humming their summer song with a soft, crooked smile.

“You’re remembering wrong,” June says gently. “But that’s okay. You always do at first.”

Emily’s throat tightens. “June? Where have you been? Everyone said you—”

June tilts her head. “Why don’t you come closer?”

Just as Emily steps toward June, everything around her disappears, and she wakes up in bed covered in sweat. Or is it lake water? Emily questions.

In the morning, the town feels strange. People look past her, not at her. Conversations seem to drift around her as if she’s invisible. When she buys coffee at the corner store, the cashier doesn’t even acknowledge her and instead focuses on helping the man behind her. Not even a blink in her direction.

A chill settles in her bones. People sure have changed around here; the thoughts make Emily sad. She forces a laugh, telling herself that people in small towns get weirder with age, but her voice sounds thin and distant. She presses a hand to her chest, feeling her heart beat too slowly, like it’s echoing from far away. Her reflection in the store window looks washed-out, sun-faded—the way old photographs lose their color.

Back at the house, she pulls out the old newspaper clippings from the attic, reading them with trembling hands.

One headline stops her heart:

LOCAL GIRL, 12, DROWNS AT SUMMER LAKE — FRIEND ATTEMPTS RESCUE

She stares. Rereads it. And again.

The photo printed beside the article is unmistakable—two girls on a dock.

June stands on the shore screaming for help.

And in the water, beneath the rippling surface—

It’s her.

Her vision tunnels. The room tilts. The edges of the clipping blur as though the ink is still wet, still fresh, still grieving. She rereads the name—her name—but her brain rejects it like a foreign language. A coldness roots itself in her spine, spreading outward, blooming like frost beneath her skin.

Her own hair fanning out like dark seaweed.

Her own lifeless arm.

Her own face, pale blue and slack beneath the surface.

“I remember…” she whispers, stumbling down the dock toward the water. The air feels heavy, warped, thick with static. She clutches the article tightly in her hand as tears spring from her eyes.

“I remember we were racing. I jumped in. I hit my head on—”

The memory returns all at once.

And then everything rushes back at once.

Not as fragmented flashes — but as truth.

The way the rock felt. The way her lungs burned.

She sees June dive again and again, surfacing each time with a louder scream. She sees the adults sprinting down the hill, their faces collapsing into horror. She sees her grandmother hit the water, her clothes clinging to her, reaching for Emily—but too late. Always too late. And June, small and shaking on the dock, her hands blue from the cold, whispering, “I’m sorry” into the wind.

“I didn’t survive,” she breathes. “I never made it out.”

The water ripples. A shape rises from beneath—her shape, barely separated from its reflection.

June appears beside her, barefoot, eyes full of something soft and devastating.

“You weren’t supposed to come back,” June whispers. “But every summer…you try.”

Emily’s voice breaks. “Why can’t I remember right away?”

June’s smile is sad. Almost tender. “Ghosts never do.”

The lake pulls her into the memory fully now—no resistance this time.

She sees it clearly:

Two girls laughing.

The sun glints sharply on the water.

Her jumping in without looking.

The sudden hit. The dizzy snap.

June screams her name, trying to lift her, crying, slipping.

The water dragging her under.

Silence.

Then darkness.

Then the endless summers that followed. Summers she drifted through, half-remembered, replayed, rewritten. Summers where she wandered back to the lake house, still searching for the moment everything ended.

Back in the present, she stands ankle-deep in the water, which laps against her skin.

June reaches out, but her hand flows through Emily’s body.

“You can rest,” June says. “If you want to.”

Emily watches her own reflection ripple, fragment, fade.

“I remember now,” she whispers one last time.

Emily closes her eyes. For the first time since she returned, her mind is quiet—no humming, no flickers of movement, no blurred faces trying to guide her. Just the weightless pull of the lake, cool and familiar. It feels like slipping into an old childhood bed, like remembering a lullaby you’d forgotten you knew. It felt like going home.

And the lake — patient, ancient — takes her gently, as if it has been waiting for this moment for two decades.