A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

“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.

“How come all the spiders are men?” “Because then it feels more satisfying to squish them,”

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

That it was one enormous storm, a single night of terror and then its aftermath. But it can take a person up to ten minutes to drown. Ten minutes doesn’t seem like a very long time, but when you can’t breathe and your lungs are aching, it seems very long indeed. You can even die after you’ve been pulled from the drink, dry on land, water having rotted your lungs beyond repair.

When he had first placed his hand over her knee, she had thought he was being warm, fatherly. She hadn’t known to be afraid. Even now, she didn’t know if she was allowed to be.

even if she was still trying to convince herself it had been nothing at all. A friendly gesture, a bracing pat on the shoulder. But didn’t all drownings begin with a harmless dribble of water?

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.

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

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. You told me I don’t see myself clearly, but I do. I know what I am. I know that, deep down, there’s not much else to me but surviving. Everything I think, everything I do, everything I am—it’s just one escape act after another.”

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

Men just say whatever they want and everyone believes them.”