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,”

It was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted. She took a sip of tea. The warmth helped ease some of her discomfort.

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

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.”

you don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.”

No matter how much she disliked Preston, it wasn’t his fault for being born Argantian, any more than it was her fault for being born a woman.

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

OMGOMGOMG

That’s the legacy of imperialism—the North reaps while the South sows.”

Ianto’s more overt antagonism didn’t bother her—a man with a gun was an enemy she could easily recognize and comprehend.

For most people, that truth is whatever helps them sleep at night, whatever makes their lives easier. It’s different from objective truth.”

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.

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

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t leave. I think I’ll die if you leave.”

the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don’t last. Full moons, flowers in bloom, you.

Survival is bravery, too.”

I know you think I am a little girl, and what could a little girl know about eternity? But I do know this: whether you survive the ocean or you don’t, whether you are lost or whether the waves deliver you back to the shore—every story is told in the language of water, in tongues of salt and foam. And the sea, the sea, it whispers the secret of how all things end.