A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

“You’re so pretty. You really are. You’re the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. Do you know that?” If she said yes, I do, she was a conceited harpy. If she shook her head and rebuffed the compliment, she was falsely modest, playing coy. It was fae-like trickery. There was no answer that wouldn’t damn her.

She was tired, tired of trying so hard for something she didn’t even want.

It was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted.

There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.

“I wouldn’t be doing my job as your mother,” she went on. “At a certain point I have to let you sink or swim.”

We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?

We are closer to drowning every year.”

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“Everything ancient must decay,” he said, and it had the cadence of a song. “A wise man once said thus to me. But a sailor was I—and on my head no fleck of gray—so with all the boldness of my youth, I said: The only enemy is the sea.”

The man she had spent her whole life idolizing had been strange and reclusive, but he had not been coldhearted. It all felt so terribly wrong. Like a dream she wanted desperately to wake up from.

“And anyway, you don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.”

Fear could make a believer of anybody.

She wanted someone to know how Ianto had touched her—even if she was still trying to convince herself it had been nothing at all. A friendly gesture, a bracing pat on the shoulder. But didn’t all drownings begin with a harmless dribble of water?

“You should know by now that I’m not a fan of doing things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done.” Preston set his jaw. “Or preserving things just because they’ve always been preserved.”

“Everyone has their own way of grieving. You can’t know what you’d do until it happens to you.”

But I think magic is just the truth that people believe. For most people, that truth is whatever helps them sleep at night, whatever makes their lives easier. It’s different from objective truth.”

but Effy was remembering all the curses that turned princesses back to peasant girls as soon as the bell struck twelve. Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.

What defines a romance? All scholars seem to converge on a single point: it is a story that must have a happy ending. And why is that? I say, it is because a romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death—and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality? When love is here, I am not. When love is not, I am gone. Perhaps a romance is a story with no end at all; where the end is but a wardrobe with a false back, leading to stranger and more merciful worlds.

“Challenging me isn’t pestering. I’m not always right. Sometimes I deserve to be challenged. And changing your mind isn’t foolish. It just means you’ve learned something new. Everyone changes their mind sometimes, as they should, or else they’re just, I don’t know, stubborn and ignorant. Moving water is healthy; stagnant water is sickly. Tainted.”

“And, well, I suppose that’s partly why I don’t have much faith in the notion of permanence. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You weren’t there in that car with Ianto. When I jumped out I wasn’t doing it to be reckless—I was saving myself. What you think of as recklessness, I think of as survival. Sometimes it’s not very pretty. Skinned knees and a bloody nose and whatever else. You told me I don’t see myself clearly, but I do. I know what I am. I know that, deep down, there’s not much else to me but surviving. Everything I think, everything I do, everything I am—it’s just one escape act after another.”

That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.

He loved nothing more than the truth, and she had loved nothing more than her imagined world. Somehow, in spite of that, they had found each other.

“I know. It’s not the most original argument, and I’m hardly the first scholar to make it—that the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don’t last. Full moons, flowers in bloom, you. But if any of that is evidence, I think it must be true.”

“Maybe the idea of constancy is what’s actually terrifying. Fear of the sea is fear of the eternal—because how can you win against something so enduring. So vast and so deep.

The unreal could never disappoint you, could never harm you, could never falter under your feet.

“I wish I had fought.” Effy surprised herself by saying it. The words had leaped out of her throat, unbidden. “I know I beat him in the end, but for so many years all I could do was run and hide. I just sat there and let the water pour in around me. I didn’t know that I could fight back. I didn’t know how to do anything but wait to drown.”

You don’t have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.”