It started with the elderly, in whispers. The little hospice rooms would house a soft murmur, always the same.

“The ducks are coming.”

Then all the others, every man, woman and child who passed away uttered the phrase— including my own sister. We’d known about her terminal illness for a while; we even discussed the matter, weeks before.

“If my last words are about the ducks, Leanne,” she whispered, “you have to find out why. You have to solve this for me. Okay?”

Now, I held her close to me as she took her final breaths.

“It’s time, Lea,” she said in that sweet, hushed voice of hers. “Don’t forget your promise.” And then, inevitably, the words came:

“The ducks are coming.”

She relaxed into my arms, gone. A week later, I resumed work at the hospital. The pattern continued until one fateful day.

The hospital overlooked a pond, usually filled with lily pads, frogs, a few fish, nothing more. The patients would look out the window at the pond or even visit it on occasion, but on the day no one was there, they came. The ducks came.

They must have come by night, for by morning there were thousands of them. They waddled through the streets, they quacked indignantly at small children, they overran every sidewalk, yard, and road. No one knew where they were coming from. They’d get into stores, houses...even hospitals. We had to keep them away from the patients by any means necessary— the hospital staff would kick the things, bat them away, scream at them to leave before turning to soothe the clearly disturbed patients.

If I hadn’t looked out the window at the pond, we may never have discovered the source of the ducks. My reasoning was simple enough: I needed a piece of my sister, a memory to get me through this troubling day, and the pond had always been where we played and invented games as children. I glanced at it from my window and gasped.

The ducks. Were coming. From. The. Pond.

They walked out, one by one, like some Sorcerer’s Apprentice bullshit. I stared, and suddenly a memory came to me.

It was of my sister and I as young children, playing by the pond.

“Leanne, watch!” She drew a duck in the mud and whispered words of her own creation under her breath. She then yelled, “Soon the ducks will come. They will come and never stop!”

She scream-laughed as she sprinkled weeds on her masterpiece. I thought the fact that the drawing burned purple was only a dream.

Now I stared out the window, and the same spot pulsed purple for only my eyes. Beth had wanted me to solve this for a reason. She remembered after all that time how her hands occasionally glowed without reason, how her drawings contained hidden prophecies.

Behind me, a family gathered around a dying grandmother. The woman gravely whispered,

“Only the sister can stop the ducks.”