A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

“I refuse mirrors,” the Fairy King said. “I refuse them for you, and I refuse them for me. If you want to see what you are, look into the tide pools at dusk. Look into the sea.”

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

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.

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?

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?

“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.”

Preston looked as surprised as she felt. But without a word, he plucked out another cigarette, put it in his mouth, lit it, and passed it to her over the hood of the car.

You don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it,

“‘I looked for myself in the tide pools at dusk, but that was another one of the Fairy King’s jests. By the time it was dusk, the sun had cowed herself too much, drawn close to the vanishing horizon, and all that remained in those pools was darkness. Her ebbing light could not reach them.’”

It was her name he’d scrawled aimlessly in the margins, repeating all the way down the page: Effy Effy Effy Effy Effy.

a man with a gun was an enemy she could easily recognize and comprehend.