My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

       The Omen: November 2, 1991

      THIS, I WOULD REMEMBER: SMELLY DARK WATER IN THE RIVER near shore, the color of rotted eggplant, we’d seen on the way to school that morning and stopped to stare at.

      On the Lock Street Bridge. Crossing on the pedestrian walkway. And there, directly below, the thunderous river (a deep cobalt-blue on clear days, metallic-gray on cloudy days) seemed to have changed color near shore and was purplish-dark, smelling of something like motor oil, roiling and surging as if it was alive like snakes, giant writhing snakes, you didn’t want to look but could not look away.

      My sister Katie nudged me crinkling her nose against the smell. “C’mon, Vi’let! Let’s get out of here.”

      I was leaning over the railing, staring down. Trying to see—were those actually snakes? Twenty-, thirty-foot-long snakes? Their scales were a winking deep-purple sheen. The sight was so terrifying, I’d begun to shiver convulsively. The odor was making me nauseated, and dizzy.

      As far as we could see upstream the oily-purple water came in surges near shore while elsewhere the river was the color of stone, choppy and thunderous—the Niagara River rushing to the Falls seven miles to the north.

      We ran from the walkway. Didn’t look back to see if the giant snakes were pursuing us.

      I was twelve years old. This was the morning of the last day of my childhood.

      (NOT OUR IMAGINATIONS. THE OILY PURPLE WATER LIKE SNAKES in the river had been real.

      Alarmed citizens in South Niagara had noticed the phenomenon and reported it. There’d been many calls to local authorities and to 911.

      On the front page of that evening’s South Niagara Union Journal it was curtly explained that the excessive discharge of sludge in the river that morning had been the result of routine maintenance of the Niagara County Water Board’s wastewater sedimentation basins and no cause for concern.

      What did this mean? What was sludge?

      When our father read the boxed item in the Journal he laughed.

      “‘Routine.’ ‘Sedimentation’—‘no cause for alarm.’ Sons of bitches are poisoning us, that’s what it means.”)