A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

Time felt both compressed and infinite. It rolled over her, like she was a sunken statue on the seafloor, but it tossed and thrashed her, too, a limp body in the waves.

The solitude that had once comforted her had become an enormous empty space where so many bad things could happen. She did not know what, exactly—it was only a roiling, imprecise dread. The silence was a span of time before inevitable disaster, like watching a glass teeter farther toward the edge of a table, anticipating the moment it would tip and shatter. She did not entirely understand why the things that had once been familiar now felt hostile and strange.

The arched ceilings and the fretwork of wood across them made her feel as if she were inside a very elaborate antique jewelry box. Dust motes swam in columns of golden light.

“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.

Someone shouldered roughly past her, and Effy realized she had been blocking the doorway to the library.

Oof. Get it together, girl.

A storm could come on as quickly as an eyeblink. The rain would cause a sudden bloom of black umbrellas to rise up like mushrooms, and it would wash all the tourists out of the street.

Just faintly, through the ever-present rheum of fog, Effy could glimpse the other side of the lake, and the green land that lay there.

Everyone had told her the university dorm rooms were disgusting, but when she arrived, she’d thought of it as sort of an adventure, like camping in the woods. Now it was just boringly, inanely gross. The grout between the tiles was filthy, and there was a sickly orange ring of soap scum around the edge of the tub.

So clean it, then? 😐

Mist rolled down from Argant’s green hills and hung about Caer-Isel like a horde of ghosts. The university’s bell tower wore its fog as if it were a widow’s mourning veil. Students stopped smoking underneath the library portico because they were afraid of getting impaled by hanging icicles.

The room was crammed with a labyrinth of bookcases, which created many dusty, occulted corners. She pulled down a large atlas from a shelf and found herself one of those corners, right beneath an ice-speckled window.

The sky was clouds and factory smog, and the line of the horizon was cut up with the crests of white sails, like the fins of lake monsters that no one from the North believed in anymore.

Rhia chewed her lip, then managed one of her incandescently bright smiles as the train sang like a teakettle behind them. “Be safe. Be smart. Be sweet.” “All three? That’s a lot to ask.” “I’ll settle for just two, then. Your pick,” Rhia said. She reached around Effy to embrace her, and for a moment, with her eyes shut and her face pressed into Rhia’s fluffy brown hair, Effy felt calmer than the windless sea.

Overhead the leaves rustled with a sound like the nickering of horses, and the morning dew on the leaves turned crystalline in the sunlight. For some reason, the way the light trickled in reminded Effy of being in a chapel. Memories of dusty pews and prayer books made her nose itch.