There’s Something in the Water Contest Winner
Meredith expected to die the day Paul cut off her head and dropped it into the frozen pond. The icy water obliterated her fear and a deep calm and resignation came over her as she sank. On the surface of the ice, her body was nothing more than a shadowed outline as it came apart beneath Paul’s merciless touch. He’d had death in his eyes when she’d told him she was leaving, but she’d thought she could outrun him. She couldn’t.
The pond was deeper than she’d expected, silty and dark. The mud and rotting leaves kissed her cheek with moist lips when her head settled on the bottom. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the shimmer of light still reaching for her from the surface, but all sound was muffled in her water-plugged ears.
But her thoughts came sharp and clear. When was the last time she’d been able to think without fear that Paul would catch her, punish her? To him, all thinking was dangerous.
Now, her mind raced on, replaying the moment of his hands around her throat, the sparkling in her vision, the gritty, tacky touch of frosted ice on her bare skin, then the fish knife across her throat, cutting so deep it severed her spine. Regret burrowed into the stump of her windpipe and wedged itself there like a bubble. She’d wanted to put up a better fight, to make him suffer a little, too.
Instead, he walked free above in the airy world, and she, nothing but a severed head, lay on the bottom of the pond, waiting for death to fog her mind with darkness.
Dusk settled. The light sucked away from the water and left her, still conscious, in the dark. Death was taking its sweet time. She wondered what Paul was doing now, if he’d thrown the rest of her body into the pond, or buried it elsewhere. She wondered if it would snow tonight, like the weatherman had predicted, covering her spattered blood and Paul’s crime in purest white. Would he confess to his beloved priest on Sunday, tell him what he’d done to her? Or would he lie and say she’d run off with another man to live in sin, because it would make her the problem, like always.
She hoped, but doubted, that he’d be caught. He played the part of the quiet, burdened man too well, and he’d surgically cut her off from anyone who would care about her absence.
She rolled his name around on her tongue, tasting the fishy iciness of the water, the plosive of his name: Paul. Paul. Paul. If she held onto it, chanting it like a mantra, like a protective ward, somehow she felt certain Death would keep its distance. She clenched his name between her aching teeth, trapping it.
Daylight strengthened, faded, brightened, drained. She tried to count the days, but one bled into another into another. The ice thickened. Winter deepened.
Still, she kept his name between her teeth, and Death did not claim her. Meredith watched the shadows of fish drift over her. She imagined the pond in spring, the ice receding from the center, the water glittering and dancing as the sunlight strengthened and greened the grass. She’d always loved the pond in summer, with sunfish glimmering in the shallows and bullfrogs calling chug-ga-rum all night.
She’d loved the pond, and for a while, she’d loved Paul, too. With nothing but time, she dissected his smile, his large warms hands, his intense and seductive infatuation with her that at the start had seemed like true love but in fact was a sticky, sweet scent to cover the musk of a predator. That smile had been the bait; those hands, the jaws of the trap. She thought about this until her teeth ached from clenching.
Then one morning, something screamed through ice above her, shaking her out of her cold thoughts. Shadows fluttered across the frozen surface. She heard music, and laughter.
The winter fishing derby. She smiled. She’d forgotten about it. Glinting hooks with flashy lures dipped into the water and sank.
Every year, she and Paul had stood at their kitchen window in the warmth of their pellet stove, mocking the people huddled together on blankets with thermoses of coffee and cocoa and containers full of cookies. She’d laughed because he’d laughed, because she was trying so hard not to imagine what it might be like to sit with friends, bundling up under flannel blankets with one’s children, and getting sticky fingers from making smores in the campfires along the shore. She’d laughed because if she hadn’t, he’d have guessed what she was thinking and would have punished her for it.
Now, she struggled not to laugh, because the single bubble of air trapped in her throat was something she needed. When a hook brushed her cheek, she caught it on the corner of her lip and bit down. There was a jerk of pressure as it punched into her flesh, and then she was being hoisted up from the muddy pond bed, the water roaring in her ears as she bulleted towards the surface. The light surged, making her squint.
A muffled voice shouted, “It’s a big one!” And then she was free of the pond. The light and the noise assaulted her eyes so used to the darkness; her ears, to silence. Screams rang through her skull; faces gaped like shadowy fish all around her.
Pain surged back, hot and burning and blinding and sharp, threatening to steal all sense, all focus. She was dying for real this time. She had nothing but a moment. The air bubble rolled up the back of her tongue and she disgorged his name burst in one gurgling gasp: “Paul.”
Others repeated it, echoed back to her, his name trapped in the mouth of a severed head, now trapped in the minds of everyone who had heard it.
Then her senses deadened to stone, and Meredith let the scrambling, shrieking, urgent world fade to darkness.
Maggie’s work has appeared in Apex Magazine, StarShipSofa, and Metaphorosis, among others.
Published 8/7/26