There’s Something in the Water Honorable Mention
It’s a beautiful day for a drowning.
The townsfolk gather around the shore in their Sunday best. Mothers complain about the sand, fathers grumble about the wait, and Elaine watches Agatha sway back and forth in a boat fifty feet from shore, rocks stitched into the lining of her dress.
When the mayor pushes her in, she doesn’t go quietly. Elaine watches as she thrashes towards the surface, hands flying. She makes it for a time, but it’s not the calm, practiced strokes she had taught Elaine two summers ago. Her movements are frantic, primal. Agatha stays afloat long enough for the mayor’s cheeks to flush, and that’s when the sheriff brings down an oar on her skull.
The blood looks like the pomegranate juice that stains her hands, and Elaine watches as Agatha sinks beneath the waves. It’s as picturesque as a half-finished baptism, a rejection from God.
But that’s her mother. That’s her mother.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name.
Around her, the townsfolk begin to pack up. The entertainment is over, after all, and there’s no use in wasting the rest of a beautiful, sunny day. They discuss lunch plans and complain about their children’s teachers and Elaine doesn’t move.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Her father comes to collect her, face stony, and tries to take her away. He talks in low tones with the sheriff, gesturing to her, as if she cannot hear them. The sheriff smiles kindly at her and offers her a cloth doll and Elaine doesn’t move.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
The sun continues its journey across the sky and the clouds begin to turn shades of pink and orange. God fills the sky with a kaleidoscope of colors and provides a gentle breeze and it’s such a beautiful day, what a beautiful day, and Elaine doesn’t move.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever.
The beach is empty and the boat is left behind to dry out on the shore and the sky is filled with stars stretching across the whole universe and it’s getting late now, so late, and her father will come to find her again soon if she doesn’t come home so Elaine picks up her skirt, the one her mother had made from her grandmother’s floral bedsheets and goes home.
Amen.
Things get a little strange after that.
It happens like this: many nights, Elaine will find herself drawn to the ocean where her mother died. She sneaks out the front door when her father falls asleep and walks to her mother’s grave. Sometimes she’ll swim far out, fifty feet out from shore, exactly the way Agatha taught her. Elaine can’t place why she does it. But it feels necessary, somehow.
It happens like this: the tides begin to rise and rise and don’t stop. Infinitesimally, yes, but constant. Incessant. It takes about a month before people start to notice. Still, it’s not that concerning yet. The mayor promises to investigate the cause, but nothing comes out of it. The tides keep rising.
It happens like this: four months after her mother’s drowning, Elaine turns eleven.
It’s a very similar birthday to her tenth, in that it’s not similar at all. Her father gives her a hug and her teacher wishes her a happy birthday and her mother is dead.
But no one talks about that because on the day Elaine turns eleven, the sheriff turns up dead.
His body lies near the shore. The mayor says he must’ve been drowned out in the water late last night. That’s the logical conclusion. There was a terrible storm last night, and the sheriff turned up floating in the sea. One plus one equals two. All evidence points to it. It sparks controversy, gossip, of what he was doing that late at night. Why he was in the water at all.
But there’s something odd about how the sheriff died. She can’t quite put her finger onto it until she gets closer to the body.
He looks obviously dead, chest lying motionless. One leg juts outward at an unnatural angle, swollen and twisted. But something’s not right. Something doesn’t add up. And Elaine doesn’t know what’s wrong until she remembers the doll the sheriff once tried to give her.
His fingernails. They’re not right. They’re jagged, broken. In some parts, they’re ripped clean off. Like he was fighting something before he died. As if he’d been clawing his way out of something.
But that’s not something to point out now. Not when her mother died only a few months ago. Not when Elaine is still too close to the incident. She could be labeled a murderer. Worse, she could be labeled a witch.
So she stays quiet.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
The reckoning hums a low and reverent prayer. It is the final breath before the Amen.
It happens at Sunday church. As the pastor speaks over the swelling music, face red with passion, the candles sputter out all at once, smoke curling like fingers towards the rafters.
The sun is the next to go.
The stained glass windows go black, shadows swallowing her saints whole. The church immediately plunges into a silvery kind of night, and the moon rises, big and glowing and red, so intensely red that the reflecting light spills over the pews like blood, like the communion wine still clasped tightly in her hands.
Elaine doesn’t move, doesn’t scream. An infant is wailing to her right, but she doesn’t turn to look. She stares straight ahead at the great wooden cross that looms over the pulpit, its shadow warped and dripping across the wood like blackened tar. Her pastor is shouting now, his words echoed by the storm of voices that rise alongside him. Repent, he says. Pray. Pray. For the Kingdom of God is here, and all who live in sin are damned to hell for eternity.
She drops the eucharist and bolts out, stepping over the pews. Distantly, Elaine can hear her father call her name, but she ignores it in favor of throwing the church doors open.
There is nowhere to go.
The ocean stretches out in front of her, flat and still as glass. It reeks, the smell strong and metallic. Cursed moonlight ripples across the surface of the water, but the waves are too intensely red to come from the moon. Elaine peers closer, but instinctively recoils back, because it hits her suddenly. The knowledge of what is causing the smell.
Her mother has always said the ocean was alive. Elaine believes it now. She watches, a silent observer in the unnatural night, as the sea begins to breathe.
Then it parts.
And her mother walks out.
It’s in this moment that Elaine realizes she’s been interpreting her dreams all wrong. The devil isn’t pretending to be Agatha. It never has. The fishermen were right.
This is something greater than God.
She bolts back instinctively, but her legs do not follow her command. They buckle and bend like a newborn fawn, blood-slick and trembling from the womb. Elaine stumbles and falls and for a moment, she’s frozen in place, in time. But her mother doesn’t stop walking.
She passes Elaine on the floor without a second glance and enters the Body of Christ.
Agatha approaches the infant first, the baby who, minutes earlier, was crying in the chapel. He’s not crying now, still and wide-eyed, his mother nowhere to be found. Agatha smiles at him, and it’s almost as if Elaine has her mother back, because she’s seen that look in her mother’s eyes so many times before. The curious confusion she always had around babies.
Her mother rips his head from his body.
Tendons spill from the boy’s neck, pale and exposed. Blood streams down her mother’s fingers, and she watches as Agatha carelessly tosses the boy aside. His body hits the floor, the sound lost amidst the screams. The head rolls towards Elaine. She can’t look. Doesn’t want to.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
The church is quiet now.
It’s the kind of quiet that’s unfamiliar, unnatural. Not like the hush of prayer, of bowed heads and clasped hands. This quiet has a physical weight to it. It presses down on her sternum, fills her lungs like water.
Elaine is still on the floor. Time refuses to pass.
He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside still waters.
She doesn’t know how long she stays there. Her heart beats out a rhythm and she sucks her breath in and out, as if the motion of it is in itself a mercy. She stays on the ground, breathing, breathing, breathing through it all as the screaming fades out. She stays there long enough for the red moonlight to settle over the bodies of her congregation like a burial cloth, patient and complete.
He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Somewhere behind her stands her mother. She walks across the wooden tiles, the heels of her feet lightly thudding on the floor. The sound of it is just so familiar that, for a brief moment, it’s almost comforting.
She doesn’t run. Her legs have already decided that for her, folded uselessly beneath her on the bloodied floor like a wrung-out cloth with no tension left to string out. And as Agatha advances towards her, Elaine knows in her soul that her mother has been saving her for last.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
Agatha stops right behind her, pauses, and moves to place herself in front of her daughter. The rocks attached to her dress have stopped dripping; the blood on her hands dried dark, almost black in the red light. She looks down at Elaine in the way she always has. Attentive, but detached. Clinical. Exactly how she viewed that baby just minutes ago.
Elaine looks up at her mother.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
The words echo in her mind without decision. Prayer is not a choice for Elaine, but rather a reflex, a flinching. Her lips move soundlessly and the words thrash on her tongue and she has said them so many times they’ve worn grooves in her throat, pathways in her mind she can’t help but follow.
Agatha crouches down in front of her. This close, Elaine can see her face clearly in the red moonlight. She looks the same, but also not. That’s her mother. She knows that, for sure and for certain, but her face is so calm. So relaxed. Even in her sleep, Agatha has never looked that serene.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
Her mother’s hand lifts, brushes her cheek almost gently. Elaine leans into it, the cold touch of her mother’s fingers. Agatha lifts her to her feet and Elaine does not struggle, limp and lifeless like a hare after the hound’s jaw closes.
Her mother’s grip tightens.
Elaine closes her eyes.
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Published 8/7/26