A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

She had read them all so many times that the logic of his world was layered over hers, like glossy tracing paper on top of the original.

She was the only female student at the architecture college.

Nightmare fuel

“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.

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?

Fear could make a believer of anybody.

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.

fingers flexing.

I see you darcy

Her grandmother still inquired about this every time she wrote, asking if Effy had met any nice young men. No, Effy always wrote back, I haven’t.

I wished he would be a serpent, a cloven-footed creature, a winged beast—anything but a man.

“I believe in the emotions—grief, terror, desire, hope, or otherwise—that might conjure one.”

It was a beautiful house, but not a clever one. It was a house with no imagination.

and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality?

But that was the problem with annihilating her imagination. Her mind could no longer conjure that escape hatch, that crack in the wall. There was nothing for her to slip through.

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

I’m not afraid to care about you, Effy.”

Well—I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me.

How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.