The Legacy Pond

   There was a black metal post, a cylinder about three and a half feet high. It had a dome-shaped top and for about six inches just below its highest point there were five horizontal slits that went all the way around just to let a little bit of light shine out at night when the power turned on.
   Every morning he would walk out to that same post, lean up against it, and look down into the clear water. Every morning he would see the same white plastic spoon gathering just a little more silt in its little scoop. And every morning he would look down through the reflection of the sky on the calm water's surface to the movement of tiny fingerlings.
   Most of these baby fish were only an inch long and no wider than a twig, but they had something in mind. Whether it was trying to snatch the much-too-large water bug that was dancing across the surface, swimming away from anything that moved towards the water, or hiding in the shallows from their adult counterparts...they seemed to know what they were doing. Strangely, a mere three feet away death by their own kind swam cooly by in packs of four or five. They were much larger than the fingerlings. For the man watching at the post, it was almost eerie to see them swim by so closely. Yet still there was that same white plastic spoon collecting silt...and then the almost invisible then fully noticeable shimmer of silver, green, and black. The grim reapers that swam in schools.