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It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous. From Angharad by Emrys Myrddin, 191 AD
She believed them all: the rote academic accounts, the superstitious Southern folklore, the epic poetry that warned against the wiles of the Fairy King. If only she could have studied literature, she would have written her own ferocious treatises in support of her belief. Being trapped in the architecture college felt like being muted, muzzled.
Effy made her way up the vast marble stairs, her footsteps echoing faintly. The arched ceilings and the fretwork of wood across them made her feel as if she were inside a very elaborate antique jewelry box.
Effy’s nose itched at the smell of old paper and mildew.
She suddenly had the very strange sensation that she was underwater.
When he spoke again, his voice was low. “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.
paramour,
The rain had made the blue ink run all the way down her wrist. “Oh,” she said. “I was mauled by a giant squid.”
“How come all the spiders are men?” “Because then it feels more satisfying to squish them,”
It was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted.
Angharad was Myrddin’s most famous work. It was the story of a young girl who became the Fairy King’s bride.
Effy found herself half in love with the Fairy King sometimes, too. The tender belly of his cruelty made her heart flutter. There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew
someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.
Her sleeping pills lay untouched on the dresser that night. Instead,
Effy pulled out her sketchpad and drew until dawn.
The university’s bell tower wore its fog as if it were a widow’s mourning veil.
flotsam
Emrys Myrddin was from here, the very bottom of the Bottom Hundred, a place so dismal and remote, Effy could scarcely even hold it in her mind.
What is a mermaid but a woman half-drowned, What a selkie but an unwilling wife, What a tale but a sea-net, snatching up both From the gentle tumult of dark waves?
“Be safe. Be smart. Be sweet.” “All three? That’s a lot to ask.” “I’ll settle for just two, then. Your pick,”
Few things could truly guard against the Fair Folk, but iron was one of them.
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?
What’s the point in studying literature if you don’t want to tell stories?
vacuous.
tacit
“Stripped down to his essence, as he is in the end when Angharad shows him his own reflection in the mirror, the Fairy King represents the very epitome of humanity, in all its viciousness and vulgar fragility.”
She could only picture him now as a crab in its slippery tide pool, oblivious to being drenched over and over again by the water.
The only enemy is the sea’?”
“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.”
churlish
The truth was, she had seen many fine and beautiful things underneath all the damp and rot, like chests of treasure waiting to be dredged up from a shipwreck. Plush carpets that must have cost a fortune, candelabras made of solid gold. But none of it could be salvaged from the rot and the rising sea.
Sew me a shirt with no seam or needlework. Plant an acre of land with one ear of corn. Build a house on a sinking cliff and win your freedom.
And it would be worse to tell him the deeper, more painful truth: that seeing Hiraeth had ruined her childish fantasy, ruined the version of Myrddin she had constructed in her mind, one where he was benevolent and wise and had written a book meant to save girls like her.
You don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it,
“Have you heard the expression about the frog in hot water? If you raise the temperature slowly, he won’t notice a thing until he’s boiled alive.
the story of the Drowning lives in the minds of every child who is born in the Bottom Hundred. Our mothers whisper it to us in our cradles. Our fathers teach us to swim before we can walk. The first game we play with our friends is to see how long we can hold our breath underwater. It’s the fear we have to learn. The fear keeps the sea from taking us.”
“And you think scholarship is completely removed from politics?”
irreconcilable.
Effy had put her faith in magic. Preston held nothing more sacred than truth. Theirs was not a natural alliance.
armistice.”
mettle.
‘Lovely and dangerous and vast beyond mortal comprehension, the sea makes dreamers of us all.’”
the two most beautiful things I had ever seen. They were both creatures of rage and salt and foam. Both could strip me to the bone. I wanted nothing more than to tempt their wrath, because if I were brave enough, I might earn their love instead.’”
That’s the legacy of imperialism—the North reaps while the South sows.”
askance
banal
“Thank you for giving me the chance to die of something interesting, then.”
“There are far more interesting deaths out there.”
acquiescence,
