Fiction from NER 44.4 (2023)
Subscribe today!
aving received permission from the overseers, the gathering convenes on the seashore and the funeral pyre is lit.
The fire spills and spreads as soon as the torch touches the wood. The thick flames leap, curling, unfurling, stretching across the bier and towards the blue sky. Tiny waves are smashed under the heels of the mourners who stamp and wail and bounce on the balls of their feet. The waves reform and rejoin the safety of the seawater.
The noon sun is a dry eye, oblivious to the commotion taking place below it.
Anuradha, wearing a white sari, squats in the dark sand before her father’s burning body. She stays out of the water because she has no desire to run into her father’s spirit.
As the clamor rises with the heat, she clutches her head-scarf closer to her mouth so none of the others will see the smile trembling on her lips. All around her, the cries of his friends, fellow cane-cutters, are loud, drowning out the quick, excited, thumping of her heart in her chest.
The smoke, black as his soul, is snatched away by the sea-breeze as soon as it reaches for air. Anuradha wafts the falling soot away from her face and turns her head from the pyre. She sees one of the overseers standing on the seawall in the distance, a midday phantom, watching over the burning.
Anushka’s family are now specters who haunt her daydreams, apparitions from another place, another life. As she trudges up and down the stairs of her husband’s house, as she makes her way into the yard, or crosses the street from the bus stop, or hustles home from the grocery store, she feels these phantasms from the old country lingering around her. When she sweeps the kitchen floor, the puffs of dust floating in slats of morning light remind her of her little sister, Anisa, laughing and throwing fistfuls of powder at her when they played Holi as children. When a pot of soup, filled with chunks of eddoes, plantains, scotch bonnet peppers, and spinach (because she could never find calalu here, in America) bubbles on the stove, it is her mother’s humming that she hears, a spell being sung to the soup, to make it rich and tasty. Her father comes to her as clouds ripe with thunderstorms, in the chill of the nighttime that forces her into the house and keeps her trapped there until daybreak.
Sometimes, the telephone rings, and there are ghosts.
—Hello?
—Daughter?
—Yes, Pa.
—You blasted ears hard or what? How much time I got to ask you the same thing? Wha’ happening with the money?
—I not working as yet, Pa—
—You can’ get it from the man?
—I don’—
—Is nah he name husband?
—Yes, but—
—Why you think I sen’ you there?
—Because—
—Why you think I married you off to tha’ man?
—For a better life.
—Yes, fo’ a better life. An’ now you sayin’ that you can’ help you family?
—I want to, but—
—But? But wha’, eh? Forget about me, I don’ matter, but you don’ remember that you got a mother an’ sister down here in Guyana? Wha’ about them?
—Please, Pa. If I could jus’ talk to Ma and Anisa, they would—
—Ungrateful.
Then the line goes dead, quick and flat, a tightened string, cut.
Anushka gently places the phone back into its cradle and returns to her work—to her cooking and cleaning and dusting and washing and wiping and cooking and cleaning and dusting and washing and wiping—because, after these conversations with her father, there is always a heaviness in her, taking the form of a gnarled and wretched tree that she feels growing inside her body, getting fuller and fuller after each phone call. It makes her sick and lightheaded, and sends bolts of throbbing pain into her skull. The root of this tree, long and fibrous, makes its home in her stomach, and its thorny vines are tight around her heart. The large wing-like leaves crush against her lungs, and the fruit of the tree, a granite-gray ball, stalks its way up and ripens, fat and heavy, in her throat. But there is no time for despair or tears. Soon it will be dusk. She will hear the screech of her husband’s car coming to a halt, the slam of the door, his footsteps on the stairs, and then, only then, she tells herself, will she have a real reason to cry.
The day after the funeral, Anuradha is happy, but wary. She knows that she must keep her joy hidden, sealed in and shut up, like a bottle that has been stuffed with a baccoo and tossed far out to sea.
She must always wear an impassive mask, especially when there are others around. She knows that a woman who smiles after the death of one of her own parents, no matter what they were like in life, is no woman at all, but a demon wearing a woman’s skin.
So, she does her work in the fields—cutting and carrying and heaping and burning and cutting and carrying and heaping and burning—and when the overseers ring the final bell, she runs home, weighed down with her steel cutlass, her water sack, and the mask she wears on her face. The mask is so heavy that Anuradha cannot wait to tear it away.
She runs into the yard of the tiny hut her father had built soon after they arrived. She pulls the romahl from her head so that her long black hair spills down her back. She tosses her sack and her cutlass, wet and grass-stained, to the side of the hut, and rushes over to the black canal that slices through the land, separating the yard from vast swathes of dark, uncultivated fields. She has spent many moon-filled nights, staring at the stretch of water, dreaming about following it and finding her way home, back to India.
Anuradha sits under her favorite soursop tree and picks up one of the many calabash husks lining the bank and dips some water from the canal, and she peers into the shell and looks at her reflection rippling in the water. Without him hovering like a ghost over her shoulder, she feels alien, foreign, new to herself. It is as if she is looking into the face of someone else, a strange woman from another place and another time, a woman who brims over with happiness.
Anuradha puts the calabash down and rushes to the hut. She enters and allows her mask to fall away. She presses her fingers to her face and tries to feel herself. She touches the crinkles in her eyes, the rise in her cheeks, the curve of her open mouth, her teeth bared to the empty room. But as soon as her fingers move from her lips to her throat, her hands become her dead father’s hands and she recoils from herself, flinching against her own touch. With the sharpness of a puncture, the room stills, and an empty silence fills the house, swelling and pushing Anuradha into a corner of the hut, her back against the thatch wall as the dead quiet spills out of the open window and through the crease under the door and in the tiny spaces where the walls meet and hold each other up to form a home. She holds her breath, afraid that the leaking silence will run through the cane fields and into the murky drains and along the gravel-strewn roadways, and release the news of her happiness, betraying her.
Then, with all the swiftness of an omen, the quiet is smashed by a woman’s faint scream—though whether it comes from a voice inside her head, or some ungodly darkness found in this strange land—this “British Guiana,” as the overseers call it—Anuradha is unable to say.
She is in bed and her eyes are open. The night is so black that she is unable to see her own hands even when she holds them up to her face.
She turns to her husband who is lying, corpse-like, next to her. She can make out his pale form in the darkness. His fair skin is one of the things that made her father think that he would be the perfect man for her. He is so very white, almost white enough to pass for a white man.
She hesitates for a second, and then, grateful for the cover of darkness, she proceeds.
—You awake?
—What is it?
—If you sleeping, you can go—
—What is it?
—Pa call me today—
—And?
—He ask for some money.
—Your father think we got it easy over here, nah? He think I got a money tree in me house that I can jus’ pick the leaves from, eh? He think because he hand you off to me mean that I got to give he whateva he ask fo’?
—No, is jus’ that times hard in Guyana right now—
—Times hard here too. Your father don’ know wha’ it mean to have to make a living in America. He don’ know one thing about the kinda pressure tha’ I under. He think because I marry you, I mus’ mind you, and he, and he wife, and he other daughter too? I name jackass?
—I don’ think he askin’ for much. We can send—
—Listen here and listen good, tell you father that I ain’ make outta money. Tell he I would send you rass right back over there if tha’s wha’ he want. An’ tell he to don’ fucking call here so much, you hear me?
—I could go an’ work.
A sharp silence cleaves the bed in two.
—Wha’?
He rises and leans over her, his face a blotted moon in the darkness.
—Wha’ the fuck you jus’ say? Work? You know wha’ people going to talk about me if I let you go and work?
When she does not respond, he laughs, spiteful, bits of spit flecking her face.
—You gon clean fo’ Americans, fo’ these white people? You gon cook fo’ them? Because tha’s all you good for. Tell me, tell me, wha’ kinda work you gon do?
Anushka says nothing and he reaches down, feeling for her face in the dark. When he finds her, he pulls at her cheek, as if she is a disobedient child, his fingernails sinking into her flesh.
—Wha’ kinda work you can do?
He moves his hand over her face and cups her throat. He slides his hand over her face again and slaps her forehead hard.
—Wha’ kinda work?
The quiet remains rooted between them. Her voice is blocked by the gray fruit pulsing in her throat. The leaves of the ugly tree inside her stretch themselves out, pressing boldly against her muscles. All her words are turning black in her mouth. All her thoughts are browning into mulch. The silence heaves and throbs, and grows and grows.
He removes his hand from her face, sucking his teeth in disgust, and turns away to sink back into the bed.
Anushka, wide-eyed, rigid, alone, becomes a ghost.
At first, she floats in the darkness, like one of those lingering, misty things, empty and ephemeral, that you might find on walks in haunted woods.
Then the familiar ache begins, the pain racing from deep within her body to nest itself behind her eyes. The tears come late, but they come, hot, heavy, and faster than she can wipe them away.
She gets up and walks to the bathroom without turning the lights on. She has long gotten used to finding her way in the darkness.
In the bathroom, she closes the door, flicks on the light, and opens the cupboard, reaching all the way to the back. Her hands find the small purpleheart box that her mother had given to her on her wedding night. She pushes the lid up and sees the two gold earrings tucked in a black cushion, twin stars glimmering in a night sky. The earrings are shaped like little bells, with rings of round pendants, and an image of Goddess Kali in each of the studs. Her mother told her that they had been in the family for many years, passed down from mother to daughter over the course of many wedding nights, each woman a pearl looping into a chain that connected her to all the others who came before. Her mother had kissed her and hugged her tightly, before Anushka was sent out to the fair groom.
Now, when Anushka puts on the earrings and looks into the bathroom mirror, she sees only a flash of the beaming, red-lipped, kohl-eyed, jewel-haired bride of her wedding night, a mirage, gone in a blink, like memories of home. Instead, she sees her true self: a girl with dark circles under her eyes, with frail hair, with misery cutting deep into her face. She has lost so much weight that the earrings look big and heavy, clunky, almost comical against her face—as if they are not meant for her at all—as if she is not strong enough to carry them, as if she is unworthy.
She turns the light off and climbs into the bathtub, pressing her sore cheek against the cool of the porcelain, her earrings tinkling. She falls asleep and dreams of black-water canals and the crimson pink of the setting sun and soursop juice running down her cheeks and henna on her hands and cane leaves whistling in the wind and her mother, her sister, and herself, huddled together in a hammock, under a hanging moon, by the sea, as the soothing easterlies wash over them. In her dreams, the moon always changes, transforming into a blue eye in the sky.
The sea breeze slithers into the hut as the door opens and jolts Anuradha out of her reverie. Before she can reach the door, the overseer—the one from the seawall—is already bowing his head at the low doorway, stepping into her home, and unfolding himself before her.
She clutches fistfuls of her skirt to keep her hands from shaking. The sight of him, of any of them in her house, is a transgression that she did not think was possible. The white man standing before her is more terrifying than anything she has encountered before. Worse than being snatched away from her mother when she was a child, more horrid than being confronted with the unknown of the roiling ocean, more painful than being thrown into an alien land.
Anuradha, and all the other coolies on the plantation, know very well what the cat-eyed sahibs are capable of. It is almost as bad as having her father’s rotten soul climbing its way out of the underworld and planting itself right in front of her.
This is it, she thinks. This is the end.
He has come to drag her to the magistrate. He has come to send her away to work another field in a faraway place. He has come to take her for a flogging . . .
She takes a deep breath, the taste of joy from earlier in the day, when she saw herself in the water, already coiling in her mouth, warping itself into a cornered snake.
The overseer’s eyes, black-magic blue, finally find her, and she flinches under his gaze.
—What is your name?
—Anuradha.
—Anuwara.
—Anuradha.
—Aniradha?
—Anuradha.
—Blasted. I will just call you Anu.
—Anuradha.
She does not mean to clench her teeth.
He takes off his dirty brown hat, walks to her, and stops so close that she can see the threads of white that line his black beard. He looks down at her, and she forces herself to maintain his stare. His eyes, she notices now, are more the color of kala pani waves at dawn. He smells of the sweaty, burnt-cane scent that emanates from all the men who work in the fields. Sweet and foul at the same time, like fruit that has been left in the shade for a while. The skin on his cheeks and ears is red and peeling from too much sunlight. A smile cracks through his worn face to reveal stained teeth. The smile enhances rather than diminishes the meanness, the cunning, the wrath that he wears in the fields. It is a wasted smile. The smile of a pale jaguar.
—Anuradha.
Her breath is locked in her throat when he says her name, nodding at her, with his bitter smile.
She thinks of her father smiling at her and what that meant.
The overseer takes her hand and pries open her fingers.
She thinks of when her father touched her.
He places something into her hands and curls her fingers back into her palm.
She thinks of the nights that were supposed to be behind her now. Nights of running away from the hut and hiding in the fields, her feet soiled with mud, the sharp leaves of the canes cutting her arms and legs. Nights of banging on doors that never opened to her. Nights of crying to the moon that watched mockingly, silently, as he dragged her back into the hut.
Suddenly, the overseer is putting on his hat. He nods at her, and grins, and closes the door behind him as he leaves.
She waits long enough for him to walk away and then she quietly, nervously, walks to the door and presses it open. She peers out and sees that the overseer is gone.
She steps into the yard. The fragrance of the jasmine flowers is too sweet tonight. The crickets are chirping, and that means that the toads are about too. Twilight has come, bringing threads of darkness with it.
She opens her palm and finds a glittering pair of jhumkas—golden earrings.
She averts her eyes from them and sees the moon, out early, full and bright as a coin, in the darkening sky. She considers it as if she has never seen the moon before, so big and tinged by a peculiar, almost blue glow.
Then Anuradha holds the earrings up to the last of the day’s light, letting them dangle free. The glistening round pendants flutter in a rush of cool, evening breeze. The earrings have a distinctive bell shape, patterned with curlicues and flowers native to India. The image of the goddess, Kali, dancing, untamed and triumphant, is nestled tightly in each of the studs. They are the kind of earrings that a mother would give to her daughter-in-law, or earrings to be bestowed upon a girl-child on an important birthday, a kind of wealth that is rare in this country, meant to be hoarded in secret for as long as possible.
Her fingers come away sticky as she rolls the earrings around her palms, and when she holds her hands up to the moonlight, against the soft, freshly star-strewn sky, she sees that her fingertips are stained, darkened by a familiar shadow. She rubs her hands frantically against the white of her skirt. When she is finished, her skirt is crumpled with small blotches and a few dark lines. She holds the earrings up, the hooks dangerously close to her eyes, as all the night’s noises vanish into the air.
A memory, from when her father was alive, shines so brightly in her mind that she shudders and drops the earrings to the ground. She steps away from them, horrified, as images of her hand clenching her bleeding nose come back to her, as she recalls the many times before, when, past midnight, he chased her into the fields, when she held her hands up against the sky only to see drops of her own blood, black in the moonlight, and shining like bitter seeds in her palms.
In the distance, the wailing of a woman rises again. The sound sends a wave of prickles across Anuradha’s skin. She realizes what the woman cries for, and, with the horror of that truth leaking into her mind, she wonders if the weeping woman is one of her own jahaji-behn, one of her ship sisters, one of those unfortunate souls who made the long trip with her over the black waters, lured by the white men who offered promises of wealth and land, only to find themselves exiled, unable to return to India and doomed to spend the rest of eternity toiling in this place, cutting sugarcane, living alongside muddy canals, and trying to survive the daily sear of the sun.
Anuradha lets the night fall around her as a pack of stray dogs, prowling the nearby cane fields for vermin, joins the crying of the unknown woman and howls to the sky.
Anushka likes the mornings because they allow her to fold the night and everything that comes with it—moon, stars, memories, pain—and tuck them all away, to be forgotten until another time.
She is in the kitchen when the telephone rings.
—Daughter?
The tree in her stomach shakes its leaves wildly.
—Daughter? You there? You talk to the man about the money? You not answering me, eh? You, good-for-nothing. You know, Victor-daughter pay the mortgage for their house every month, and Marcus-daughter buy another property in Essequibo. Wha’ you doing fo’ you family? Not a blasted thing. You know how hard me and you mother work to mind you an’ Anisa? Wha’ about you grandmother, Anjum? You know how hard she life was, and yet she had a good-enough heart to give people anything they ask for. And you other grandmother, Anandi, who sell bananas in the market from since she was thirteen to the day she drop-down and dead, right there in the market. And even you great-grandmother, Anuradha, who—look, don’ get me started. Don’ get me started on this kiss-me-ass day. You just down there in that country, letting that man use you, and you not getting anything out of it. Stupid. I raise you to be smarter than tha’. I should have marry Anisa to him an’ cast you out to beg on the street—
Anushka bangs the telephone hard against the kitchen counter. She hears a sharp crack and before she can do anything about it, she finds herself slamming the slender phone into the hard counter, again and again and again, the shattering noises splintering into the air. Shards of the phone’s casing smash into shrapnel around her. Copper wires spring from the battered body. The jagged edges knife into her hand. She continues to hammer away. Drops of blood dot the white counter. When all she has left are a few pieces hanging from threads of copper, she hurls all of it against the nearest wall.
The pain in her head returns with the force of a hard slap. The tree is swelling, its fruits ripening in her brain, her lungs, her heart, her stomach, her throat, her mouth. She squeezes her eyes shut and vomits onto the floor. She opens her eyes, expecting to see bits of root and stems and leaves, but there is only a watery mess. She sticks her fingers in her mouth as far back as possible, and she retches, but nothing comes up. Her stomach is dry.
She strides over to the remains of the broken telephone on the floor and lies next to the pieces. She sobs into the bits of plastic and metal and the coppery filaments. She thinks of her mother and laughs at her, at herself, at all the women in her family who were good wives, but never good enough, not really. She thinks about Anisa, doomed to repeat the same things as all of those before her, and all those that will come after her, again, again, again. Pearls on a string.
She continues crying, in loud whimpers that hang in the air all around her.
She closes her eyes to distract herself from her pain and her anger and her sadness, her fingers tracing the outline of one of the earrings that she wears. She thinks of the goddess, Kali, four-armed and black-skinned, unruly hair hanging to her waist, wearing a golden crown and a garland of skulls and a skirt made from the severed arms of her enemies, carrying a bloody sword and the head of a demon, and standing on the chest of her lover who stares up at her with tender eyes.
Anuradha is in the cane fields at midday when another woman’s cry, shrill and painful, cuts through the rows and rows of tall, blackened stalks that surround her. This scream is shrill, lighter than the heavy wailing that had permeated the previous night.
Anuradha unties her romahl and wraps it around her head in a way that muffles the sound.
She wipes the sweat from her brow and continues with her work. She tries to focus on her task, of weeding away the long grasses that sneak into the cane fields and wrap themselves around the cane stalks and slowly, slowly, leech the life away from the canes until only dry husks are left and the crop is ruined. She chops at the grass, swinging her cutlass wildly, slashing at the thorny weeds.
Another scream stalks through the fields, and she closes her eyes and continues to cut, cut, cut, hacking her way through the brush, droplets of sweet cane juice spinning from her blade into the red, noontime heat, where they turn to vapor before they even hit the ground. She keeps her eyes closed and her arm swinging and her cutlass biting, and she thinks of the bloody earrings he had given her and the way he had smiled at her and the joy she had felt when she was finally, thankfully, alone after the death of her beast of a father, and she had been so happy, so hopeful, and the house was empty except for her, and the yard was empty except for her, and she could wander around and dance and sing and smile if she wanted to, and then, laying eyes on her father’s flaming pyre and seeing his chance, he had come to her house, armed with the overseer’s dagger and whip and white skin and blue eyes and false smile, and had given her gifts touched by blood, and she is slashing, angrily, angrily, angrily, and there was a woman screaming through the night, a woman probably holding her torn, bleeding ears as her children watched on, confused and crying, and now there is another bloody woman screaming right now, right now, and Anuradha knows, she is certain, certain, that she will see him again, that he will stride into the house that her father had built, that was now hers, that she will never be able to lean into the canal by the soursop trees to see her own smiling face again, that he will bloody her hands and she, no matter how she much she rinses or plunges them into cold water, no matter how many skirts she wastes with her wiping away of blood, she will never be able to remove the stain from her fingers, and will never be able to rid her mind of the piercing, maddening screaming, and she will go back to being a ghost, wandering the fields at night, and her cutlass keeps swinging and swinging and swinging, and large beads of sweat drip from her face and the sun scalds her bare hands and there are red ants on her feet and there is the screaming of the woman in the distance.
Anuradha collapses on the scorching ground, exhausted, as the last peals of the screaming finally die away. Cane stalks, struck down by her blade, lie all around her, weak and broken, tangled with the weeds, and bleeding sweet juice into the soil. She blinks dirt and tears away from her eyes.
When the bathtub is full, she undresses and climbs in. She stretches herself out in the water. The water is warm. The cuts on her hand sting a little. When the workday is done, when she walks into her yard, she casts her cutlass down and hovers on the bank of the canal. The soursop trees loom large and provide some shadow, their spiky fruits rich and full in the afternoon glow of the sun that is hurrying below the horizon. She looks into the canal and sees the reflection of an unhappy woman undulating in the water. She undoes her long hair and allows it to soak in the tub. Long black tendrils float around her shoulders and arms. She undoes the romahl, pulling the sheath of hard cloth from her head. Her hair is a waving flag in the wind. She closes her eyes and rests her head on the edge of the tub. She cups her hands over her ears, allowing the weight of the gold earrings to rest in her palms. She thinks about how heavy they are. She loosens a knot in the cloth and takes out the earrings that she had retrieved and hidden there. She puts them on her ears. Around her, she sees that the fireflies have come out, dots of gold swimming around each other in the thick, quickly darkening, evening air, and when she turns back to her little hut, she sees that he is already there, waiting for her, jaguar-smiling at her. The door opens and her husband enters the bathroom, a quarter-moon-smile carved into his face. He looks down at her. He looks down at her as he steps forward, tall and smiling, and waving, as if they are old friends, as if they have known each other for years, as if they are lovers.
—Wha’ happen in the kitchen?
—Anu, Anu, are you well?
—I askin’ you wha’ happen in the kitchen.
—Anu, Anu, you are wearing them.
—Why you hands bleeding? You trying to kill yourself?
—They look beautiful on you.
—Where you get them earrings from? I never see them before.
She says nothing.
She says nothing.
He stoops so that his leering face is right next to hers. He uses his index finger to nudge her ear so that the goddess is forced to swing back and forth, thudding softly against her neck. His hands are on her face, moving over her ears and the gold earrings, and then touching her chin and her throat and her neck. His hands, strong and heavy, settle on her shoulders. He rests a hand against her neck. The weight of them makes her feel as if she is being pushed into the ground. She shudders at the coldness of his hand.
—You ready to apologize fo’ las’ night?
—I have something for you.
He lifts a pair of silver choodiyan from his pocket and wipes the blood from them on his shirt, leaving a small red streak across his chest. He grabs her hands and slips the bangles onto her wrists. They feel like manacles. She thinks about the screaming women, and her hands tremble violently in his. She reaches out to him. She touches his face, and he frowns and then relaxes against her hand. Water pools on the floor, wetting the mat and his shoes. She ignores his clammy skin. He smiles and pulls her close. The smell of burnt cane is overpowering. He licks his lips. She reaches out to him with both hands and pulls his face close to hers, tenderly, gently, gently. He closes his eyes. He closes his eyes. She leans out of the water and clasps her hands around his head. She slips out of his grasp and darts for her cutlass on the ground. His eyes open wide but before he can say anything to her, she rises and holds on to him tightly, and, with every bit of strength in her body, she smashes his face hard against the rim of the bathtub. The look of surprise on his face mutates into a scowl. His face is red, and his nose is bleeding. His eyes are dazed. Drops of blood drip on to the mat and the perfect, white tiles. She arches her arm high and swings it down—just as she had earlier that day to slash the sugarcane stalks. She cracks his face once more against the tub, and then lets go of him as he slips to the floor. She shrinks back into the water, horrified. The blade of the cutlass strikes, deep and smooth, into his neck. He staggers back and falls. There is a smudge of crimson on the edge of the tub. Spots of blood, like rubies, line her skirt. His eyes are still open, drops of black-magic blue, darting around wildly. She steps out of the tub and stands over him. She stands over him. The tiles are slick with water and red. A tooth lingers at her toes. She is afraid to touch him. She reaches out and gently presses her foot against his neck. She presses her foot against his shoulder. She pushes down on him so that she can pull her cutlass from his body. Thank god, she thinks, feeling the reassuring beat of a pulse. She yanks the cutlass out and wipes the bloody blade on the grass.
She sits in the bathtub again and lets the water wash over her. Her legs dangle playfully over the side. Her eyes are clear, and her mind feels light, unfettered. She climbs down to the edge of the canal and slips in, easy as an otter, and begins to make the journey across to the other side, to the flat, swampy land that lies beyond, cutlass held high to prevent it from getting wet and rusty. She knows that she will keep close to the canal and follow it all the way to its end, and, hopefully, she will find a path to India there. Her earrings clink softly as she pulls her legs into the water and dips her head under. Her earrings jingle against the surface of the water as she makes her crossing, her head tilted up to the sprouting stars. The world above is washed away, and for the first time in a long time, she can feel her body relaxing, resting gently against the cushioning calm of the water. The water climbs up her neck, and passes her chin and then her ears. For a moment, all she hears is silence, but then she listens closely and realizes that there is something—or someone—twisting below the surface, moving alongside her. Below, there is quiet, but there is also a soft lapping of water against flesh, that she finds comforting, like a song, a lullaby, or a hymn. She moves her lips under the skin of the water, sounding out words of welcome, of calm. She hums back and bubbles rise from her mouth. Then she breaks the surface for a breath. She is going home, she thinks to herself. She is going home. ■