A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

“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.

“The deer in the South have developed some peculiar adaptations. Webbed feet and scaled bellies. Biologists have speculated that it’s evolutionary preparation for the second Drowning.”

this author really likes to write about mutant deer (see - Fable for the End of the Word lol)

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?

And it would be worse to tell him the deeper, more painful truth: that seeing Hiraeth had ruined her childish fantasy, ruined the version of Myrddin she had constructed in her mind, one where he was benevolent and wise and had written a book meant to save girls like her.

“Now you’re being truly ridiculous. This isn’t about politics, not in the slightest. This is about scholarship.” “And you think scholarship is completely removed from politics?”

“No. But ideally it would be. Scholarship should be the effort to seek out objective truth.” Effy made a scathing noise in the back of her throat. “I think you’re deluded in even believing there’s such a thing as objective truth.”

Effy always wondered whether her mother had picked her name, Euphemia, to be a blessing or a curse. The feminine variation of Eupheme, patron saint of storytellers. Most of the time it just felt like a cruel joke.

She didn’t add the last of what the Fairy King had said: That he had taken her ring finger so that no other man could put a wedding band on it. So that she would always belong to him.

“And, well, I suppose that’s partly why I don’t have much faith in the notion of permanence. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”

She wasn’t afraid of dying, not really. It was the ultimate act of flight, an escape artist’s tour de force.

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.”

“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”

Until I broke the spell my mind had cast, I could not ever be free.

You were a pretty young child, with your golden hair, but there are many pretty children, safe in their beds, who I cannot touch. I come for the girls who are left out in the cold.

All around her Effy could feel walls coming up, rising out of the earth like a tree from its roots. But they didn’t feel stifling. The architecture of her new life was taking shape, and there were windows and doors. She did not need to slip through cracks in order to escape. If she wanted to leave, she could. If she wanted to stay, there were repairs that could be made. The foundation would be strong. Effy was sure of that.

The danger was as ancient as the world. But if fairies and monsters were real, so were the women who defeated them.