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.

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?

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