Skinny-Dipping With The Ghosts of Tell-Tale Lake

Eliza May Wilkins thought she’d had enough of living, but a gaggle of horny ghosts decided to raise her spirits.

Eliza May Collins was twenty-one when she accidentally gave birth to her very first child.

She named that first child Homer because it was her first time letting a man make it past second base.

Of course, she knew Homer hadn’t really been an accident, but things can happen mighty fast up here in the hills.

One minute you’re talking to some fellow about whether or not it was going to rain tomorrow, and then all at once, he’s worked his way in between your legs, doing his very own special kind of a rain dance — and just like every other kind of rainstorm, first you get wet and then you get wetter.

And then there’s that third kind of wet, which comes a little later.

Which was how she came to marry Sam Wilkins.

Sam was a local boy, considered to be one of the best baseball players in the whole county. In fact, he was so good of a player that there was talk of him maybe someday playing pro baseball, but those plans hadn’t taken into account the sudden and very distinct possibility of an early marriage taking place.

You see, Sam was the fellow who’d planted his seed in Eliza’s lower forty.

Now the problem is that when you’re twenty-one you don’t always know how to politely tell somebody no thanks, and by the time it’s over you’ve moved on to just trying to make the best of things, hoping that it will turn out for the better.

So Eliza’s Daddy had a long old talk with Sam. Eliza was pretty sure a shotgun was involved in that long old talk. Later that day Sam showed up with Eliza’s Daddy, got down on one bent knee ,and asked “Eliza-May Wilkins, your Daddy says that I need to marry you or he’s going to find somebody big enough to throw me high enough for him to work on his skeet shooting. I don’t want to be skeet shot so will you marry me?”

Which sounded almost nearly as romantic as Sam asking “Eliza-May, would it be all right if I parked my mule in your stall, so long as I promise to shovel up after him every Sunday or so?”

Romantic or not, she and Sam got married the very next Sunday.

Of course, them being married meant that Sam got to forget all about bothering to touch first, second OR third base. As far as Sam was concerned, being married meant a trip to home plate nearly every night — so the two of them just kept on getting wet and getting wetter.

That third wet is still coming along.

Which was all right for Sam, but in less than a year passing, Eliza-May was carrying another baby.

It wasn’t too much longer before her family doctor told her that second baby was actually going to be twins.

Eliza guessed that Sam had been packing his very own shotgun, and it must have been double-barreled because he got her twice.

The twins turned out to be a pair of girls, that Eliza named Marigold and Bluebell, because they were the prettiest flowers that she could think of.

“Twins run in both your Momma’s and my side of the family,” Daddy said. “It ain’t much of a surprise that they run in you.”

The only problem was once those twins showed up, Sam decided it was time for him to run, too.

Sure enough, Sam took to his legs and he run without even having the grace and good manners to say goodbye. Which was his way of teaching Eliza that there was a third kind of wet that loving could bring you.

Namely the wet feeling of tears running down your cheeks.

She’d yet to find out about the fourth kind of wet.

Now that trail of tears was what brought Eliza down to the banks of Tale-Tell Lake. Once she heard what Sam had said, she knew that it wasn’t going to get any better. Three kids and a broken ring was not exactly a formula for success.

“It’s a hot day,” she told her Daddy two weeks after Sam took legs. “I believe it’s time I took me a little skinny-dip swim and cool off.”

Now, before I go any further down this particular road that Eliza has found herself upon, I ought to tell you just a little bit of background about Tale-Tell Lake.

Up until about forty or fifty years ago folks just called that lake “Oh, that there lake”, meaning that nobody thought it was worth coming up with a for-real kind of a name.

That was until the three Lamb brothers decided to rob themselves a train. They almost got away with it until they stole Old Man Wilkin’s best-only rowboat to escape the pack of local police who were following them in a sort of lukewarm pursuit.

You got to understand that those local law-dogs had been tailing after the Lamb brothers for about half a week or so, and the heat and enthusiasm was kind of leaking out of what had once been a hot pursuit.

Which is what happen to the rowboat when Old Man Wilkins caught the Lamb boys making off with it, over that there lake. Old Man Wilkins put a load of buckshot through the rowboat and it took on water and before you could say “Bottoms up”, those three brothers were kind of wishing that they hadn’t skipped their swimming lessons.

Those three brothers, and the chest of gold that folks say they stole, headed straight for the bottom of that there lake and never come back up again. Since then, in the winter when that there lake freezes in, folks say that you can hear the ghosts of those three brothers moaning and groaning and mostly complaining about their drowned-dead situation.

Which is when folks decided to call that there lake, Tale-Tell Lake.

Now Eliza knew just exactly what she was doing.

She was tired of what had happened to her and she figured she could find herself a long goodnight kiss from the lapping of the cold lonely waters of Tale-Tell Lake. She was tired of living and she figured this might have been the best way to get out of the mess she was in. She left her kids with her Daddy and she hoped in the bottom of her heart that he’d understand why she took to leaving them all behind like she was fixing to do.

Yeah, I know she wasn’t making all that much sense, but what can I tell you? Sometimes stupid gets in everybody’s eye-holes once in a while.

Anyway, Eliza peeled off her cotton dress and walked just as naked as the day she was born, although truth to tell she really couldn’t remember if she’d been wearing clothes or not when she’d first squirted out from between her Momma’s legs.

Eliza kicked out into the water, swimming just as far as she could manage to get.

Around about when she got out to the middle of Muddy Lake she let go and dove under.

The lake water was colder than a banker’s heart and darker than a widow’s funeral shawl.

A fish or two swum past, but they didn’t seem to pay Eliza any heed.

The water pushed around Eliza’s lips and she almost choked and panicked, but then she reminded herself that drowning was what she’d set out to do in the first place.

Don’t panic, she told herself.

Just try and drown calmly.

That’s when Eliza saw the first ghost swimming on up to her. It was a fellow, with skin just as white as a bleached turnip and head that kind of looked like a rotting pumpkin about two or three weeks past Halloween, and he was grinning at her just like he had just heard the world’s very best knock-knock joke.

Yeah, it was the ghost of the oldest Lamb brother, just in case you weren’t taking notes.

“Hey pretty girl,” that ghost said. “I got a present for you. You don’t even have to unwrap it.”

He’d been wearing pants when he said “present” but before he made his way to the “you” part of the sentence that he was saying he just kind of swam right through the fabric of his pants like they weren’t made out of nothing but the forgotten memory of a barely-whispered prayer that God didn’t even bother to listen to.

Now Eliza had learned enough about bed-doings in her short marriage career to see that that ghost’s wing-dangle was pretty spectacular. It kind of looked like a long pale deep-water eel, squiggling around between his legs, and she was kind of curious about what that long wing-dangle of his might feel like between her own legs.

But she was more curious about how she could be thinking those kinds of thoughts while she was doing her flat-level best to drown herself under — and hey, just how long did it take a body to drown, anyway?

Besides all that wondering, ghost or not, Eliza knew exactly what the fellow was after and she wasn’t having any part of his doings. Hell, it had been those kinds of doings that had got her into this mess in the first place.

So she just sort of squirmed around in the water and tried to kick away from that spooky old horndog of a ghost.

Except there was a second ghost in back of her.

“Hey, pretty darling.” the second ghost said. “How about a poke or two?”

“Better yet,” said a third ghost. “How about you give all three us lonely old fellows a friendly sort of poke?”

“We don’t usually see many as pretty as you are down here,” the first ghost added.

By now all three of those lonely mushroom-pale ghost brothers had surrounded her.

The first ghost’s wing-dangle had stretched out like a long old piece of rope, the kind that Indian fakirs used to practice their Indian rope trick. Yes sir, that old boy was looking like he could have been a candidate for the Guinness Book of Dirty Records for world’s longest wing-dangle.

Come to think of it, all three of them had diddle-sticks that could have been used as lassoes come cow-catching time.

“Look at that, brother,” the second ghost said. “I’m guessing this girl has never seen herself an honest-to-booga-booga extra-long ecto-penis.”

That’s when the third ghost made his move, letting his pale white long-honker twine itself around Eliza’s naked leg like a tangle of clinging ivy, slithering all the way up to her wet little love-grotto and gently knocking at the door.

Well, this was certainly a different kind of an experience from what Sam had always provided her with, which generally ran somewhere along the lines of jump in and Geronimo.

Mind you, some folks would call this adultery — but can it be adultery when the husband that you’re cheating on has already ran out on you? And these guys are ghosts. So it’s kind of like having sex with the obituary column.

How bad could that be?

Besides, Eliza was already committing suicide, so it wasn’t like she was going to go to heaven anyway, assuming you folks all believe in heaven.

What the hell, she decided.

If she was supposed to be damned for drowning herself in the belly of Tell-Tale Lake, she might as well be damned for diddling a back-from-the-dead pack of pool-noodle peckers!

“All right, you three funky phantoms,” she called out confidently. “Get those sidewinding sex-serpents over here. I’ve got three perfectly good gopher holes that badly need plugging and I am ready, willing and able to perform with all three of you gents, before I go under.”

So the very next thing Eliza knew she had one of them albino corn snakes diddly-sticks squeezing up my cornhole, a second long slinky saddle horn slithered into the cozy of her fuzzy furrow, while she played swallow-the-cucumber with the third.

My good god, she thought to herself. Why’d I have to wait to kill myself to enjoy squid-diddling with so with more than fellow at one time.

That one in her asshole had that moon-colored thing worked up inside of her poop-hole, jigging around like the agitator of a washing machine.

The ghost lover in front of her was working his diddle-stick like it was a bullwhip, cracking it inside of her, wiggling it around and sending her over that thunder moment that she used only hit when she was diddling herself in the backyard privy.

She was pretty sure that he’d somehow managed to split his wing-dangle in two at the end, like one of them two-headed dragons she’d heard about in fairytales.

Meanwhile, the one down her swallow-hole had gone so deep inside of her gullet that it was a wonder she hadn’t choked herself.

Speaking of choking…

She shook herself free, and them ghosts didn’t put up all that much of a struggle, as if they had expected her to make a fuss.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “When the heck am I supposed to drown, anyway?”

The oldest ghost-brother laughed a laugh that sounded a little bit like a bullfrog farting in a mudhole.

“Girl,” he said. “You drowned a long time ago. You don’t think we ghosts get our hat’s boxed by living folk, now do you?”

I’m dead, Eliza thought, with shock.

“Sure you’re dead,” the second ghost-brother said, as if he’d heard her thoughts, and maybe dead people do that, after all.

“There’s your Daddy and your young ones out there on the shores of the lake, about to throw some flowers for you.”

Eliza looked, and sure enough her Daddy and little Homer, and the twins in a leather rucksack that Daddy had stitched up to carry were standing there, crying their eyes out.

“You wanted to be dead now, after all,” the oldest ghost-brother said. “Isn’t that what you told us?”

And then the water darkened and the world seemed to spin around and Eliza opened up her eyes and seen her Daddy and her three children looking down at her.

“Lordy girl,” Daddy said. “You put the fear of god into us. We thought you were dead.”

And her Daddy’s tears splashed upon her face and she found out that there was a way of getting wet that hurt and happied more than she could ever imagine.

Mind you, when little Homer reached down into the water and dragged up that old bank box full of gold coins you could have knocked her over with a duck feather.

These are rough times we’re living in.

If someone you know is exhibiting warning signs for suicide, don’t be afraid to ask if he, she or they are depressed or thinking about suicide. Listen without judging. Your friend or family member just needs to know that you care about them. That you are willing to hear them talk about how they are feeling. Encourage them to seek professional help.

If you are having suicidal thoughts of your own, you are not alone. Help is available 24/7. Call your healthcare provider, go to the emergency room or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1–800–273-TALK.

Reach out to a friend. You are not alone.

Ginger Bangs is complicated. She’s as changeable as a prairie fire. She writes humor, erotica, horror, recipes, slice-of-life, and EVEN poetry! Please follow her today. Once you’ve read one of her stories you’ll DEFINITELY want to stay on her tale!