Backwash

"Perpetua" by Amelia Shields

There had been a nightmare, one I couldn’t stop replaying. My ribs pulled back like a white curtain, and I was facing a mirror, and there was nothing, nothing at all, inside except this long space, wet and slimy and filled with algae. Like a peach gutted of its pit, left hollow in the center, refilled with whatever lives at the bottom of a lake. I’d wake up trying to summon my lungs back to my body, choking on nothing.

I’d ingested stories, too many, about what happens to girls in bodies of water. Lurid and overblown, flesh turning into fish-food, wrists tied with rope or throats crushed, filled with blood. No one monitored the TV I watched back then. No one gave a shit, and so I took advantage of it. Thea and I would watch Dateline and ID when it got too hot to even stand outside for more than a minute.

That summer the lake coughed up all kinds of things. Beer bottles, perfectly intact, shimmering like seaglass. Cigarettes unlit, somehow still smokeable, not yet waterlogged. Matchboxes still packed tight, unblackened at the ends. Sticks and pebbles and heaps of tossed orange peels, lime skin, full unopened lemons. Condoms, wrappers and all, unexpired. It didn’t make sense, how all of that stuff could go into the water and come out untouched, unruined. It didn’t make sense how all we had to do was leave each object in the sun for ten minutes or so, and it’d return to its original state, pre-sinking, pre-lake.

It became a game we’d play. Something to pass all that time. The heat gnawed through everything that summer, ate at our skin and our ability to enjoy much at all. We sweated so much we couldn’t stand to wear clothes; we ran around in our swimsuits, took cold showers and held ice cubes against each other’s faces. We sucked on cherry-lime popsicles and lay in the shade of a patio or under a tree, faces smeared with red. We—Thea and I, both twelve, then—didn’t think about the shape or meaning of our bodies yet. We still knew each other then. Best friends, sure, but the words never felt adequate. There was no air between us. No empty space. Just warm skin and what seemed like a shared bloodstream, pulsing.

We’d go down to the lip of the water and toss in a variety of random objects. Firewood, sheets of printer paper, our mothers’ gossip magazines, shampoo, pairs of sneakers, Bic lighters. We tried to push up against the limits of the lake’s seamless preservation, and failed each time. Everything would make its way back to the shore, as if pushed, invisible hands guiding it all back to dry land.

No one else knew what the lake could do, how it’d transformed, that summer, from a normal midwestern lake into a digestive system, into a site of endless resurrection. We didn’t tell anyone, of course, not at first. We didn’t want to share.

It went like this for two whole months. Thea and I tried to scrape off our boredom like gum from the bottom of a shoe. We didn’t swim in the lake, uncertain of what might happen to us if we tried. Instead, we made do with the muddy strip of creek that sprouted and branched from its edges, a thin, lesser artery. We threw ourselves into the cool water and taunted each other with threats of ingesting brain-eating amoeba or a cottonmouth bite. We were mean and unkillable, we thought, and perpetually marked up by mosquitoes, our hair and foreheads greasy, peeling from hours in the sun.

That summer we smelled like the damp insides of a cave, always, no matter how many showers we took.

On the first night of August, Thea and I snuck out and met up by the lake. I brought one of my mother’s half-used candles, matches, and a blanket. Thea brought a Corona she’d stolen from her father’s stash in the garage. He drank so much, she’d say, that he wouldn’t notice. He couldn’t keep track of much, anyways. Most days, he’d see through Thea, like he couldn’t quite make out the full shape of her, his brain fogged with whatever drink he liked that week. On the bad days, though, it didn’t matter what he could see, or how clearly—he directed his rage at anything, anyone, nearby.

I see something, I said. Someone. A familiar shape. Out in the water.

You’re crazy, she scoffed. But I knew she was listening. She’d pretend to discount what I said, but she wouldn’t actually mean it. I nudged her shoulder, too hard. OW. What the hell?

Look, I pointed. I stood up, woozy from the beer, or at least dramatic about it, and stumbled toward the dark water. Thea shouted my name, asked me what the fuck I was doing, but I couldn’t answer, just gestured, over and over, toward the lake.

The cold didn’t stun me the way I thought it might. Instead, it welcomed me, pulled me further in. I waded in up to my waist, and stopped.

I’m going under, I called, and took a breath before plunging in.

What can I say? That chronic nightmare, the one that I knew by heart, had been a kind of memory, maybe, birthed and sewn in water. Of an underneath, slick and opaque, that showed itself to me without hesitation or any disguise. Below the surface, I saw a face I knew well, better than well, a face almost like a doorway. Almost like I could swim towards it, and away from what might wait outside of the lake—

Hands, yanking. I bit down on my tongue so hard I drew blood. Thea had run into the water and wrapped her arms around me, pulling me up and away. I sputtered and coughed and yelled at her to let me go back down, but she wouldn’t listen.

She dragged me back to the shore, grabbed my face and stared, hard. She leaned forward and licked the lakewater from my throat, up to my jaw, and my lips, lingering there, like a question, like a dare. I didn’t move. She nudged her tongue inside, and tasted the blood, felt the wound and didn’t flinch. She swallowed, and pulled away, looking at me like I’d just told her a secret.

In the morning, we returned to the beach. We were distracted. We didn’t pay much attention to the lake until we heard its sour, sordid burp, and out of the water, things emerged ashore.

Teeth, first. Entombed in glossy pink matter, as if torn straight from the gums, imprecise. Molars, and an incisor; we counted two cavities, jagged black lines running through the underside.

These were not animal teeth, we knew, but didn’t say.

Slowly the other pieces emerged. They’d burst up from the surface and into the dull heat, suddenly encased in sunlight. A retainer, translucent, pristine. Strands of braided black hair, unbroken. Fingernails, uncracked, painted glittery blue, exactly the color of the polish we’d stolen, once, from the local Walgreens. Jelly sandals, the short heel Sharpie’d with the jagged black flames Thea drew all over her school notebooks. A tube of rose-scented lip gloss. A packet of Juicy Fruit gum, half-empty. Thea and I chewed the rest. It hadn’t lost any of its sweetness. It soothed the mark on my tongue.

We collected these fragments and, delicately, laid them out across the flattest rock. Each thing stayed intact, but whatever threaded these bits together was gone. Thea and I looked at each other and talked only with our eyes. When I’d gone into the water, and she’d followed me, we’d opened a valve. Released a breath. The water still preserved what went inside, but we’d changed its behavior, shifted or polluted something, and now, some part of us was a part of the water. We knew it, and we didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but here we were, watching metamorphosis like we hadn’t been the ones to cause it.

Nothing ever stays fully intact, anyways.

It struck us, finally, that we should probably tell someone. Like an adult.

The bones washed up not long after. Dense and smooth-edged, off-white. This is when we spoke, finally, to my mother, who called the cops despite the fact that there was no one we all trusted less than the police. They swarmed the shore, put up yellow tape and brought out people to look more closely at the bones and everything else.

The water began to stink. The cloying scent of rot, like vegetables left unrefrigerated overnight. We watched as they picked at the debris and the lake seemed to die right in front of us, its water browning, blackening, and thick spurts of algae clumped at the surface.

No one said it, but we suspected, Thea and I, that the lake had tried to give up its final secret before it started to choke on its own history. All that it had swallowed and spit up. All that it had held, briefly, and returned.

About the author

Sofia (Sof) Sears is a queer writer from Los Angeles whose cross-genre work has been featured in publications such as Waxwing, the Sonora Review, the LA Times, and numerous others. They recently directed and produced their feminist-monster play at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. Currently, they are pursuing their MFA/MA in Fiction and English in Northwestern University's Litowitz Program. You can find them at sofsears.com. 

About the artist

Amelia Shields (b. 2002) is an artist living and working in North Carolina, USA. Born and raised in Greensboro, she graduated from Davidson College with a BA in Studio Art and Art History in May 2024. In her oil paintings, she immerses herself in the process of worldbuilding, creating spaces that capture the essence of transition. Influenced by the intricacies of natural patterns and the wonder of speculative fiction, her work invites you to explore moments suspended between the conception and final establishment of a fantastical realm.