A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

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

“Argant has plenty of its own superstitions, let me assure 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.”

“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.”

What you think of as recklessness, I think of as survival.

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

But if fairies and monsters were real, so were the women who defeated them.

How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.