Winner | Fear Writing Contest
Melissa Bowers of Gilroy, California for “What Lies in Sapient Lake”
What Lies in Sapient Lake
Babcia tells us cemetery stories as we grow up. It used to be different, she says—majestic and vast. Water clear and still and glassy, the seaweed deep beneath bending to the whims of some invisible current. There were no fish, as if they could see the future with their lidless eyes, as if they already knew what it would become. Babcia is different, too, we think. Stooped and wizened. Brittle. We cannot picture who she must have been before.
While we are young, we watch at sunset. The women don’t sing hymns for what they bury. They just kneel and scoop their fingers through the sludge, dig as quickly as they can before the hardening, layers upon layers of fossilized rage by now. Secrets stacked like cinder blocks. We tell ourselves stories of our own: We will never be them. This will never be us. But we grow, and we keep watching.
Many will bring wedding rings, Babcia whispers, and then: Children did cannonballs here. Curled themselves into something fetal. Sank and sank and began to disappear, and just when everyone thought they might need saving, there they were: spluttering toward the surface, limbs lengthening with each stroke. The absolute beauty of it. The relief.
Others will bring ripped jeans found crumpled beneath their beds, she says, stained with blood and caked-dry creamy white, and then: I wish you could have seen it—how blue and clean the water.
There are countless sacrifices at the bottom. The teeth This One lost right before she left. The wine glass with Somebody Else’s lip print along its rim. The vase that shattered against Her headboard, its pieces glued together as imperfectly as a patchwork past. The hand—an entire hand, wrist and all—from the last person to reach for That One, long clumps of hair still tangled in its flaccid fingers. Are there bodies? we ask, but Babcia only stares.
Once we are old enough to learn the answer, we reach into the pockets of our souls and drown the things we find, take them by the neck and hold them facedown in the murk while they writhe and thrash and then go silent, hold, hold, until they stop breathing what belongs to us. From the distant muddy banks, the young ones watch as we reclaim our air.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa Bowers is a writer from the Midwest who is currently based in California. Her stories have won awards at SmokeLong Quarterly, F(r)iction, and The Writer, and have twice been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 as well as The Best Small Fictions anthology. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, River Teeth, and The Forge, among others. Read more at www.melissabowers.com.
What Lies in Sapient Lake © 2024 Melissa Bowers