There’s Something in the Water Honorable Mention
Nine months after the flood, people in Bellweather began seeing the dead in water.
It began in ordinary places.
Mrs. Havelock saw a little girl in the bottom of her teacup and dropped it so hard the handle snapped off. Mr. Prentiss, who had lived alone for forty years, found a boy standing ankle-deep in his birdbath, though the basin was only three inches deep. A child from Cedar Street refused to bathe because there was another child beneath the bathwater, curled against the porcelain, staring up.
People blamed grief. Bellweather had plenty of it.
The flood had come at night, sudden and stupid, the way disasters do when they want to seem impossible afterward. The river had risen with the spring thaw and the storm drains had choked on branches. By morning, the lower half of town was brown water and floating furniture. The old maternity hospital, which had stood empty for years except for storage, collapsed first at the west wall, then all at once, like a mouth giving in. By morning, the flood had claimed dozens of lives, many of them mothers and children.
Afterward, the water did not fully leave. It gathered in the low field behind the hospital ruins, where there had once been a children’s baseball diamond and then nothing but bud. The town called it Miller’s Pond because the field had belonged to the Miller family generations ago, but everyone knew it wasn’t a real pond. It had no spring, no fish, not a single sign of life to it. Still, it sat there through June and July, dark and still, reflecting the sky.
The first time I saw the fetus, I nearly stepped on it.
It was raining outside the grocery store. The parking lot had filled with shallow puddles, silver under the streetlights. I was carrying a bag of onions in one hand and my phone in the other, arguing with my mother about whether Nana’s old photo albums should be thrown out or kept.
“Mooom.” I groaned, shifting the bag in my arms. “Just keep them. We don’t need to decide tonight.”
I looked down as the bag of onions was slowly sliding down as I was losing my grip.
In the puddle beside my shoe, something floated beneath the surface.
At first, my mind refused to understand its shape. I thought it was a pale leaf, then a drowned mouse, then a trick of the parking lot light. But the thing gradually turned in the rainwater, though the puddle was barely deep enough to cover the sole of my shoe, and I saw the curve of a head, a narrow back, folded knees pressed to a small chest.
A fetus.
It floated there as if suspended in a depth that did not exist. Its skin was pale and deeply wrinkled, as though it had been soaking for a very long time. A thin cord trailed from its stomach and vanished into the dark below.
Its eyes were open. Not normally, no. They were fully formed and lidless, too large for the face, black as wet seeds. They did not blink. They did not wander. They looked directly at me.
“Mara?” My mother’s voice through the phone stunned me back into the present. I stepped backward so fast the onions split through the paper bag and rolled across the wet asphalt. When I looked again, the puddle held only rain.
While I was shaken, I told myself I had imagined it. The town had been strange since the flood. But I saw the fetus again the next morning, in the glass of water beside my bed.
It floated beneath the ice cubes, impossibly distant yet impossibly near, curled in the middle of the glass with its cord drifting like weed. I did not scream. Screaming would have meant I believed in it. I only stared, every inch of my body immobile, until the ice shifted and struck the side with a soft click. The fetus turned with the movement, slow and weightless, and its unblinking eyes found mine again.
I threw the glass against the wall.
That afternoon, I went to see Mrs. Havelock.
“You’re Anna Whitcomb’s girl.”
“Yes.” I said, relieved she recognized me.
Over the next few hours, I learned more about how Mrs. Havelock saw her five-year-old daughter that she lost fifty-two years ago. “She stood at the bottom of my teacup in a blue dress…” her mouth trembled. “I never put her in a blue dress before. But I missed that version of her. Isn’t that strange? I missed her after seeing her, as if I had lost her only then.” She told me other people’s stories of seeing the dead as well.
Everyone saw someone who should have existed longer than they had.
Everyone except me. I saw the fetus. It appeared in pitchers, in gutters, in the dark curve of a spoon after I washed it. It never moved except to turn its face toward mine. Still, I began to feel that it knew me, and worse, that it expected me to know it.
My mother noticed before I told her.
“You look like your grandmother,” she said one evening while sorting through the old photo albums at the dining room table. “She got that same haunted look when she was keeping something in.”
I almost laughed. “Nana kept everything in.”
“No,” my mother said quietly. “Not everything.”
She pulled a black album from the bottom of the box. One picture stopped me. My grandmother stood outside the hospital, one hand resting on her swollen stomach. She was young, maybe in her early twenties.
I touched the corner of the photograph. “Wasn’t Nana thirty when she had you? I didn’t know she was pregnant before you.” My mother went still.
For several seconds, she said nothing. Then she closed the album halfway. “There was a flood then too,” she finally said, her eyes wandering about. “Not like this one. Smaller. The river came up behind the hospital. Your grandmother was there overnight for observation and somehow… she lost the baby.”
“What was its name?”
She paused for a moment before answering. “I don’t know.”
But she knew something. I could see it in the way she refused to look at me.
“Mom.”
She rubbed her thumb over the album cover. “Years later, she had me. She used to say I was her little miracle, but not in a happy way. More like she was apologizing to someone.”
I looked back at the photograph. My grandmother’s hand curved protectively over the child who had never been born, the child who had died before my mother existed. Before I existed.
Outside, the rain began tapping lightly on the windows.
My mother whispered, “Mara, what have you been seeing?” I didn’t answer because the window beside us had gone black with evening, and in the thin water sliding down the glass, someone pale had begun to form.
The fetus floated there, suspended in the rain on the other side of the pane. Its eyes were open, steady, patient. My mother followed my gaze. She made a small sound, almost a squeak, and then covered her mouth.
That was when I understood. The thing in the water was not a warning. It was not asking for help. It was looking at me because it thought I was the answer to a question it had been asking for longer than I’d been alive. Why her? Why not me?
The next morning, I decided to go to Miller’s Pond. I didn’t tell my mother. She would have tried to stop me, and I was already frightened enough without having to be brave in front of her. But I needed to know more about… everything.
The air smelled of wet grass and river mud. The pond was darker than it should have been. There were no ducks, no insects crawling on the surface. Even the weeds seemed to lean away.
I stopped several feet from the edge. “I’m not coming in,” I said, and hated how childish I sounded. A few seconds later, the fetus appeared. It rose from below without disturbing the surface, floating upright now, knees tucked, arms folded against its chest. Its skin was wrinkled, almost translucent. Its eyes fixed on mine, just like every other time.
I took one step back. The fetus drifted closer. “No, stop!” I screamed abruptly, staggering back.
I thought of my grandmother’s hand on her stomach. I thought of my mother, born years later into a house occupied by grief and absence. I thought of myself, standing there with my living breath and my living hands and my future, all of it built on the emptiness where another life should have been.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my voice gentle. The fetus didn’t move. “I really don’t know what you want from me.” And for the first time, it opened its mouth. No sound came out. Only water moved between its lips.
I turned and began to run. I wasn’t stupid enough to wait until the fetus swallowed me whole, nor was I dumb enough to run toward the pond and stumble into it like women did in old stories. I ran away from the edge, toward the road. But the ground near Miller’s Pond was soft from weeks of rain, and when I stepped into the grass, water seeped up through the mud and over the toe of my shoe.
It was only a little, barely enough to darken the canvas. Coldness touched my sock. I froze. Behind me, the pond made a soft sound, like someone exhaling. I didn’t look back.
By the time I reached home, the sky had cleared. My mother’s car was gone from the driveway. The house was silent except for the old refrigerator humming in the kitchen and my own breathing, too loud in the hallways. I locked the door.
My wet shoe made a faint print on the floorboards. I stared at it, waiting for something to happen. I didn’t know what, but nothing did anyways. The print slowly began to fade.
I laughed once, shakily. I took a step forward to my room. The floor creaked beneath my foot.
But behind me, a second board creaked too.
I paused, the hallway light casting my shadow long across the floor. Just one shadow. My heart jumped to my throat. I turned slowly toward the door. There was nobody there. Then I looked down. Across the hallway, beside my own fading shoe prints, was another trail. Tiny, wet footprints.
I stopped breathing.
The second set of footsteps didn’t.
Published 8/7/26