When I was a little boy in Finland, my Mummi warned me about the vesitonttuja, the water sprites. We went to visit my grandfather's grave in Jyväskylä. It was a cold, rainy day, and everything was foggy and gray. When we reached Ukki's grave, there was a great big puddle in the middle of the dirt road that led there. I was a little boy, so of course I was fascinated by the puddle. The water was perfectly still, so you could see the reflection of the thick gray clouds covering the sky, and beneath the reflection the dirt and the stones at the bottom of the puddle, and little tadpoles darting among the stones. While my mother was arranging flowers on the grave, I squatted next to the puddle, to get a closer look. Suddenly, I saw in the water the reflection of my Mummi standing over me, scowling down at me. She grabbed me by the back of my jacket and pulled me away from the water, and said, "Be careful! The vesitonttu will get you and pull you in."

I looked up at Mummi's face to see if she was joking, but the expression on her face was the same as on Sunday morning when she listened to the Lutheran church service on the radio.

"Mummi!" I said, "There's no tonttu in the water. You can't fool me."

"Yes there is," she replied, "He's right there looking at you, licking his lips at the thought of making you his next meal."

I looked back down into the puddle, and sure enough, there for just a split second, I saw the two cold, pale slits for eyes, and the gray, scaly claws for hands, and the wide, crooked grimace full of rows of hooked teeth, like the teeth I saw once in a pike that my Uncle Vate caught fishing at the lake near Mummi's house. The tonttu was there deep under the water, like a second reflection, as though the mirror of the water was showing us something in the gray half-light of a cloudy day that we could never see when the sky is bright blue. When it saw me looking back at it, it smirked wickedly, as though laughing at some horrifying joke, then suddenly vanished, leaving only clouds and mud in the puddle again.

"Mommy, mommy!" I cried, running to grab my mother by the sleeve, just as she had finished arranging Ukki's flowers, "There's a vesitonttu in the water. Did you see it? It was right there!"

"Yes, yes. That's nice dear," Mother said, "Now try to be a little bit better behaved. We're in a cemetery, and people come here to pray and be quiet, like in a church. So you should be quiet."

"But...!"

I saw Mummi frowning at me and shaking her head, as if to say, "This is our secret." And I never did speak about it again to anyone, not even to Mummi.

Now I live in Minnesota, and it was over thirty years ago when Mummi showed me the wicked little man under the water. Now when Mother visits Finland, she puts flowers on Mummi's grave as well as Ukki's. I had almost forgotten all about the vesitonttu, but then something happened to remind me.

Last summer we had four gray, dreary days of constant rain and drizzle. Finally on the fifth day, a torrential storm broke. The skies went from gray to dark green. The wind blew wildly, whipping the branches of trees and rattling the eaves of the house. Lightning bolts flew from one horizon to the other, turning the sky bright purple as they went. Trees came down, and the power went out for a few hours, so all we could do was sit in the upstairs porch with the candles lit and watch the sheets of rain whip down. The rain went on and on, and soon the floodgates under the streets broke open too, so in addition to all the water coming down from the sky there was water gushing up out of the sewer grates.

The storm petered out sometime in the middle of the night, around three or four o'clock. The next morning the skies were clear and the sun had come out. People surveyed the damage around their houses. It was mostly tree branches lying on the ground. An old elm tree in one neighbor's yard had nearly split down the middle, and half of it lay forlornly on the ground, mourned by its other half. On the lower end of our street, the sewer had become completely clotted with leaves and branches and muck, turning that entire corner into a miniature lake. Cars had to slow way down, or they would send up a twenty-foot-long shower as they passed.

Some neighborhood kids were playing in the giant puddle, swatting it with fallen branches and splashing muddy water at each other. "You kids probably shouldn't be playing there," I shouted at them. They stopped and turned to look at me with dumb expressions on their faces, like a pack of raccoons caught raiding the garbage. Then they turned away from me again and continued shrieking and running around and splashing in the water as though they had never heard me.

I shook my head, and went back into the house. A half hour later, I looked out the window, and saw that all but one of the children had gone. The one left behind was a little girl I knew named Rayna. Rayna was always running around somewhere in the neighborhood, at all hours of the day and night. We knew Rayna had a dog, because she lost it once, and we were the ones to find it. When we did yard work, Rayna would show up to pester us with impertinent questions. But even indoors we were not safe, because she would ring the doorbell, wanting to ask us questions or talk just when we were sitting down to dinner or to watch a movie on TV. Now Rayna was out playing hopscotch in the big puddle, feet bare, her pink dress soaked and her face spattered with thin, gray mud from the street.

I stuck my head out the door of the front porch and shouted at her one last time, "Rayna, it's time to go home." She stuck her tongue out at me, and kept playing waterscotch. I shrugged my shoulders and went back into the house. That was the last time anybody ever saw Rayna.

A few days later, the police came knocking at our door. They asked about her, about when we had last seen her and so on. I told them what I knew, that I had seen her the day after the big storm, playing in the water puddle. I pointed out the corner with the storm drain to them. They took notes and then thanked me and then were gone. Later that day I noticed fliers with her picture stapled to telephone poles and taped up inside the bus stop at the corner of Chicago and 31st Street.

The thought of her playing in the puddle brought back those childhood memories I had gradually taken for dreams or fantasies. I remembered Mummi pulling me back from the edge of the puddle in the cemetery in Jyväskylä. With a sinking feeling, I went to the street corner where the puddle had been a few days earlier. The street was still littered with dirty leaves and old branches, left behind after the water had drained away. I peered down through the grate. Only stitches of light penetrated to the bottom, but I could see the glimmer of water below. I stared into the darkness, straining for a glimpse of something. Then in the gloom I thought I saw what looked like two pale, luminescent slits for eyes staring back up at me from below the water. Finally they blinked out and vanished.

I stood up with a sick feeling, and it was then I noticed a bit of pink cloth underneath the detritus of leaves. I pushed the leaves aside and dug out Rayna's pink dress.

Daphne Kuha-Welter, 2004

My mummi (Finnish grandma) actually did warn me to watch out for a vesitonttu in a water puddle in the cemetery where my ukki (Finnish grandpa) was buried. But in my memory of this real-life event, I was pretty sure Mummi was just teasing me. When we have big rain storms, the drain on our street corner really does get clogged up and floods the street.