A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

“I know it’s not realistic, but the world would be a better place if everyone just told the truth.”

Effy had never thought much about the lies she told—she didn’t feel good about them, but they didn’t rend her apart with guilt, either. Lying was a form of survival, a way out of whatever trap had been set.

Preston especially, with his pretentiousness and disdain for anything that couldn’t be proven. Yet even though he held to his principles, he wasn’t as close-minded as she’d initially imagined him to be. He truly considered all the things she said, all the new information presented to him—and he’d even told her he was perfectly willing to be proven wrong.

“I told you, I don’t like lying.” “This is for a good cause. Isn’t it worth lying a little bit, if it helps get to the truth?” “Interesting paradox.

It was all tangled up like catch in a fishing net, nearly dead things thrashing as they choked on air.

Maybe Preston was right about why people believed in magic. The truth was an ugly, dangerous thing.

Euphemia Sayre,

“You said you believe in ghosts,” she said thickly. “What’s so different about this?” “I said I believed in the horror or desire that might conjure one,”

I believe in your grief and your fear. Isn’t that enough? No. It wasn’t enough. As long as that was the only thing he believed, she would always be just a scared little girl making up stories in her head.

She let those small things slough off her; the small things were never what ruined you. If she were kneeling and examining the shells on the beach, she wouldn’t see the titanic wave rising over her head.

She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.

lascivious.

You can learn to like anything if you drink it enough.”

Says the sea to the sailor: strive with me and live; neglect me and drown.’”

The sea is treacherous, but women are even more treacherous.’”

Love is a fire that cannot burn alone.’”

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.

debauched

“I will love you to ruination.” I sat up as if I’d been prodded, since neither of us had said those trite three words to the other before, and answered somewhat groggily, “Whose ruination? Yours or mine?” You did not answer, and I still wonder.

“Writers take things from their real lives all the time. It’s not as though the phrase is copyrighted.”

penitently.

dichotomic,

multitudinous

“You don’t see yourself very clearly, Effy.” Preston shifted in his seat so that they were facing one another. “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.”

Hydrocephalus. Water on the brain.”

A sad little girl’s effort to make sense of a world that was insensibly cruel.

Fear and pain could be endured if you knew that eventually, they would end.

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.

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

Survival is something you do, not something you are.

Water finds its way through the smallest spaces and the narrowest cracks. Where the bone meets sinew, where the skin is split. It is treacherous and loving. You can die as easily of thirst as you can of drowning.

The land would never protest if the sea washed over it with what could not be called anything else but affection.

‘One must know before loving.’”

“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”

Effy understood why the Southerners, in the very ancient days before the Drowning, believed that there were only two gods: the Sky and the Ocean. The land itself was just something caught and pressed between their warring furies.

stories were devious things, things with agendas. They could cheat and steal and lie to your face. They could crumble away under your feet.

The magic was the impossibility of it. The unreal could never disappoint you, could never harm you, could never falter under your feet.

The sea is a thing no sword can slay.

Aging, Effy realized, was the opposite of alchemy. What was now silver had once been gold.

“when things are meant to rot, they will.”

“That’s all I wanted, you know,” she said. “When I was young—when I was your age. I wanted just one girl, only one, to read my book and feel that she was understood, and I would be understood in return.

What wisdom do you want from a death-marked girl? I can say only this: In the end I learned that the water was in me. It was a ghost that could not be exorcised. But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that which despises you, that which terrifies you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.

“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.”

Better to pen a story of your own. Better to build your own house, with a foundation that was strong, with windows that let in plenty of light.