scinnlaece:

When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any
fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child,
with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind.

It was because I couldn’t bring myself to believe that that perfect smooth
expanse was no more than a thin film of water over solid earth. I believed
it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny
ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a
bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of tentacle and gleam of scale lay
hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in
the far-down depths