The man thinks back to his childhood and how his fondest memory concerns the woods that encircled his house. As a kid, his parents don’t allow him inside of the woods. Every day, his chores have to do with snapping twigs, pulling weeds, and otherwise maintaining the boundary between property and forest. He hears about the pond god from someone at school, though in the present, he cannot remember who precisely told him about it. As a boy, he sees a face in his dreams, and he keeps a dream journal.

The boy’s parents spend a lot of time in the woods. He has a friend who lives in a nearby house with a cow pasture attached to it. His other friend is a skinny, wild dog that his parents gave him after incessant begging. One day, the boy sees his mom weeping because of his father’s hospitalization after a construction incident. He overhears his mom later talking about the need for a sacrifice. The next day, the skinny, wild dog disappears, and his mom says that it ran away. The dad comes home from the hospital days later.

Soon enough, cops show up at the boy’s house to ask about children who recently vanished near the woods. By summertime, the boy hangs out with his friend by the cow pasture. His friend tells him about the pond god. The friend describes it as a creature larger than a bull with rubbery skin and yellow eyes. The boy matches the description to the face he sees in his dreams. The friend then recalls how his parents saw the pond god the week before and then vanished. When the boy tells his mom about the pond god, she tells him to be grateful for what he has.

Over time, the boy falls in love with a girl at his school. However, his friend is also in love with that girl and discusses his plans to marry her. The boy doesn’t say that he also has feelings. As he gets older, the boy sneaks into the woods more often with the girl. Once, he sees his parents in the woods with the pond god. He runs away and struggles to fall asleep that night. In the morning, his parents act as if nothing happened. He believes that the pond god has his parents under its spell and vows to kill it.

The boy tells the girl about his plans to kill the pond god, and she reveals that she has also seen it in her dreams. On the night the boy ventures out to the woods, he is faced with his friend from the cow pasture, who learns about the boy’s plans from the girl. The three of them then meet, and together, they head into the woods to kill the pond god. They soon find it. The friend says that he has to be the one to kill him, but the boy still forges on by himself in hopes of striking the killing blow. However, when faced with the pond god in its weakened state, the boy believes that he must help the pond god and not kill it. The friend, with a machete, still manages to kill the pond god anyway, but the friend is killed by the surrounding vegetation.

The morning after, the house is swarming with bugs. The mom asks the boy what he did. Years pass uneventfully, but the land gets sold off and developed slowly. The boy’s mom is diagnosed with cancer, and the family sells the house in order to get the money to treat her. In their new house far away, the boy and his family forget about the pond god entirely. Now as an adult, the man looks at old pictures of the house and the woods on his computer. He closes out of it.