A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

Time felt both compressed and infinite. It rolled over her, like she was a sunken statue on the seafloor, but it tossed and thrashed her, too, a limp body in the waves.

the wind off Lake Bala lashing her cheeks and running its frigid fingers through her hair made it feel longer.

like small bones being shaken inside a collector’s box.

An account of one of Llyr and Argant’s many wars, told from the perspective of a sentient rifle.

under a rain-marbled window,

So she said, fumbling, “Maybe you can help me with the cross sections for Parri’s studio. Mine are really bad.” The boy brightened, drawing himself up to his full height. “Sure,” he said. “Let me give you my number.”

Framed degrees lined the wall like taxidermy animal heads.

But she couldn’t bear it, the rush of floodwater in her ears, the haze that fell over her eyes, the nightmares smothered only by the annihilating power of her sleeping pills. She wasn’t a Southerner, but she knew what it was like to drown.

Effy felt calmer than the windless sea.

storm clouds roiling like steam in a pot.

It was like two daggers driven into her ears.

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.

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.

But Effy had listened to this record turn a thousand times. There was no use saying any of that, no use saying anything at all.

Effy hated that she couldn’t tell right from wrong, safe from unsafe. Her fear had transfigured the entire world. Looking at anything was like trying to glimpse a reflection in a broken mirror, all of it warped and shattered and strange.

“No. But ideally it would be. Scholarship should be the effort to seek out objective truth.”

“I think you’re deluded in even believing there’s such a thing as objective truth.”

“I suppose we fundamentally disagree, then.”

“You really care more about the truth than you do about being right?”

steam wafting from the cut like a spirit escaping its vessel.

Even as the wind blew through the doorway, Ianto’s black hair lay flat.

By then it had grown dark, and only a pale trickle of starlight bled through the window. The moon was pearl white and not quite full, cobwebbed with lacy clouds.

She caught just the end of each, and the heel of a bare foot, pressing up from beneath the surface of her phantom skin like a fisherman’s tangled net and the fleshy sea-thing caught in it.

The pills were meant to be a seawall against her visions, against the unreal world that always seemed to be blooming underneath the real one, like the beat of blood behind a bruise, waiting for its moment to break through.

Her white hair lashing like a cut sail, her skin so pale it was almost translucent.

most of them inappropriate, many of them downright lascivious.

It was envy.

“Masochism has nothing to do with it. You can learn to like anything if you drink it enough.”

Effy pressed her lips together, overcome by the inexplicable urge to smile.

as neat as bodies in crematory drawers.

the clouds a bruised violet.

The deer was unperturbed. Dead, as it should be.

His eyes were fascinating from this vantage point, light brown ringed with green, gold daubs around the irises.

They knit themselves to the men’s sides, their gloved arms curling through their husbands’, which were blocky and stiff with black wool. When they laughed, they put their white hands up decorously to cover their mouths.

It was as if someone had put a tie and jacket on a rotting pumpkin.

She had not come this far only to be thwarted by her own memories, her own weakness.

But it crashed against an invisible seawall, a barrier as stubborn and unrelenting as the face of a cliff.

“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.”

“A traumatic brain injury, the doctors said at first. He might return to his old self eventually, but there was no way to tell. Day after day, and he hardly recognized us, my mother and my brother and me. Sometimes I could see a rare moment of clarity in his eyes, when he remembered someone’s face or name, but it would be gone again in just a blink.

until the tether snapped and she was forced to look at Ianto again.

The words now felt like prophecy. If a story repeated itself so many times over, building itself up brick by brick, did it eventually become the truth? A house with no doors and no windows, offering no escape.

You jump out of moving cars and dive into dark water.”

Effy was silent for a moment, letting his words settle over her and then slip off, as if they were that dark water itself.

What you think of as recklessness, I think of as survival. Sometimes it’s not very pretty.

But it had made her unstable, untrustworthy, a fragile, flighty thing. That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.

“You’re not just one thing. Survival is something you do, not something you are. You’re brave and brilliant. You’re the most real, full person I’ve ever met.”

And still something slid between them, like water through a crack in the wall.

There were a thousand ways to drown.

Her mind was a knotted sea net and foaming waves.