Fear of Water by Molly Collins

Fear of Water by Molly Collins

I live in a house. Okay? That’s important.

I wake up to the sound of tumbling. That’s an indistinct description I know, but my synapses are still asleep and some part of that feels correct, like the tumbling of laundry in the dryer or a dark, heavy-set god stumbling down the stairs outside. Imprecise, I know. I’m still asleep.

Outside the universe is a block of salt. I’m sorry, there’s no other way to say it. The front door has been opened—my hand, waking—and the sky is blue, the ground is blue, everything is reflecting itself and each other like a mirror maze instead of like my front lawn in a cozy inland suburb-outside-the-city. My eyes think for a moment, blink. I’m awake.

Now it hits me. Somehow my house has become surrounded by the ocean. This is ridiculous, you see, since I live in the middle of the country. There’s not so much as a lake within a hundred miles of me. Flooding? Perhaps, but I hadn’t seen anything on the news. And it’s creepy, the water is crystal flat, and that’s when I realize the second problem. There is just me and my house and the ocean. There are no neighbors, no streets. No other houses striking up from the glassy surface of the water. I creep down the steps of my porch, reaching my shaking fingers to the water as if it’s an acid bleeding from the earth. It might be, who knows. I remember I’m hungover and wonder if hangovers can cause delusions but as soon as my fingers touch the water it’s real.

I sprint inside, dig my phone out from the crack it fell into between my bed and the wall. Damn fucking phone, can’t reach it. I flop on the bed, squeeze my arm in that subliminal space, hand comes up for fresh air with the catch in tow but—dead. Hungover, right, I let it die last night. The charger doesn’t work. I follow my thoughts and switch on the light—dead. The TV downstairs is silent. This is the moment where I should tell you that I live alone.

I slap down the steps and back to the front door. I can’t tell you why but my butt drops to the stoop. In front of the house the water is so blue I might throw up. The horizon is so white with the spit-back reflection of the sun that I can’t look at it, not directly. My fingers dip into the water again and I suck on their ends. Salt.

I should think about the rest of the world, where my neighbors have gone. I should think about the power and how if it’s not working, I can’t contact anyone. I should think about how I don’t see any break in the water, how I’m all alone. What my rations are. What the state of the world might be. Instead, I make a snack. I come back out with a peanut butter sandwich. I chew it slowly, stare at the water I can’t look quite at because it’s reflecting the sun I definitely can’t look at. I wonder where the fish are. I wonder what they think of me.

I make a list of books I have yet to read. I stick my feet in the water.

When I finish the first book, it’s still the same day. I set it down next to me and look back out at the glass water. I keep my feet on the stoop, just barely submerged, to remind myself it’s real, to not let myself be tricked into thinking I can sprint out on it and run and run and run until I return to wherever normal is. Is this happening anywhere else in the world? Is it happening everywhere? Maybe it happens all the time. Someone’s asleep and they wake up and suddenly they’re all alone and they’re counting the number of tuna cans they have and subtracting the days left until they might starve.

Ahead of me, the smear of red between the horizon and the night is the width of my thumb. I hold it up and squint, cock my head to the side to see if I can make the day last longer. It doesn’t work. There are already stars, winking and laughing at me. I lower my hand.

I pull my feet from the water and fold myself over, so that my face now hovers above the darkening water. I splash it towards me—it’s not so terrifying when broken up, when you separate the surface from what’s reflected, the droplet from the sea.

I begin to rinse myself. Which is to say, I begin the patient work of dying.

It doesn’t matter if I’m not making money. I don’t have any electric bills anymore. Haha.

I wake up to a terrible siren coming from my phone. It’s the middle of the night, I’ve gotten used to the pitch black without the street lights or cars driving by. It’s been three weeks.

CAUSE OF WATER UNKNOWN. RESCUE ATTEMPTS ARE IN PROGRESS, CONDITIONS UNKNOWN, PLANNING ONGOING. HIGH WINDS, LARGE PREDATOR POPULATION. TAKE PRECAUTIONS.

Then the phone dies again. I don’t know how they turned it back on, but the government has their secrets. I wonder why the message forgot so many verbs, forgot what it was doing.

I place the phone back on the nightstand and fall back asleep.

I don’t give a damn about the sea creatures, the predators. I can build a boat. I’m not quite sure how, but I imagine it’ll take some wood—my kitchen table. And some more—the couch—when I fuck it up the first time. It takes a few days since I have no idea what I’m doing but I’ve got nothing else to do and if I don’t break out and get myself to shore, I’ll go insane.

I can’t die here.

In the water, maybe. But not here.

It’s been four months.

Break out is the wrong word. No one trapped me here. Can you be a prisoner without a warden? I told myself I wouldn’t get this way. What’s a prison? No one answers.

What’s a shore?

I have a dream I’m drowning. My fear of water is a reasonable fear of death. At least, I think I’m drowning, yet—

But yet is a phrase that means nothing these days because I’ve slammed the back door on time, right in its face, and descending, I suppose, means nothing without time. Space dimensions and all that. I think I read about that in a science class in school.

But I’m still in the middle of a nightmare and time means nothing without a body to move through it and suddenly

Suddenly

I’m looking down at my body

Drowning in the water

And my hands are gone

Where are my hands

Where are my hands

Where are my

I could live this way, if I have to. Forever, I mean. Here on my island. I mean, what choice do I have? To accept this life or die? I’m not strong enough to give up, I’ve realized that. I forgot to mention—I’ve started growing plants in the kitchen. They get enough sunlight there. It’s only the things that I had that happened to have seeds in them—peppers and lemons and a few tomato vines—but somehow they’ve survived. When I run out of macaroni, I’ll try to start catching fish. I’m dreading that, I don’t want to hurt them. But I’m hungry, you know. Gods need to eat.

There’s a bird that’s landed here, did I mention that? A large black one, it doesn’t look like a normal sea bird to me but what do I know about the sea. He has huge feathers, longer than my face, and his eyes are angry and smart. He’s not angry at me, he’s not angry at anything. I imagine those are what a god’s eyes look like. Did you know that even the shy gods love to party? I learned that recently. It has something to do with power, something in their nature.

The black bird stares at me. His eyes are ancient. He asks, what are people?

I tell him I don’t know.

The bird and I patrol the perimeter of the house every morning. Sometimes it’s impossible, when the tides are too high and they just wash straight up to the paneling of the house. But most days there’s a bit of grass around it—or yard, at least. The grass has turned to mostly mush, and I’ve salvaged what dirt I could into scoops of drinking cups that I store in the cabinets, for when I might need more soil to grow.

So, we patrol the house. I chat to him, sometimes, to make sure I’m not losing my voice. I don’t know if he likes much what he hears, and I don’t think I’ll share with you what I say. It really depends on the day.

One morning we come across a visitor while we walk. Not a visitor, a body. I’d say it’s an octopus but it has too few legs, or too many. It’s a ball of shiver and liquid bones, it quakes before I can even touch it. Even though it’s twitching, and I think breathing a little, I know it’s dead. The bird doesn’t think so but I can tell. My hand is the size of the bird’s feet, I’m a God, I know these things.

Under the sunlight the thing lurches itself, closer to the house then away from it. He’s trying to die. I don’t want to help him, but I put a hand on him anyway. I whisper something, I don’t know what. Or I don’t want to say. Anyways, the thing starts pulsing water out of its pores, thick and soupy water, like pus. Its skin is a scaly black, only the scales are so fine I can’t trace their edges with my eye. They’re the texture of survival, which means my soft hands, uncalloused by the sea, these are the hands of a creator. I flip him over, I think I hear him squeal.

The bird hops up to the roof, perhaps he’s had enough of my playing. I poke what I think is the middle of one of the thing’s legs and a gush of the sticky water oozes out. It drips across my fingers and I press them to my mouth. Warm. I spit it out, apologize, say a prayer to this thing, and then wipe my hands across my shirt.

I study it closely. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want to leave it dying here, and I don’t want it rotting outside my house. Maybe it will attract the predators that the government message warned me about. Maybe it is the predator. Maybe it’s the government. Maybe it’s another version of me.

I lean down and smell the musty salt of the thing, too musky, I almost choke. I kiss it. I realize I’m kneeling in front of it and stand.

When I walk into the house, I hear the bird fly down. I don’t look out, but I think I hear him begin to eat.

I’ve decided that I’m only going to fish at night. At first, I pretend it’s because I read somewhere that fish are more active at night, but I admit that I made that up. I wait for night because that feels more hidden—it’s hard to feel hidden, when you’re the only island in an ocean, even if you can’t see the eyes on you. There are always eyes. Some of the fish at the bottom of the sea have hundreds of eyes—this one I really did read somewhere. They need that many just in the hope that they might be able to latch on, in the small chance that even down that far there lands a trickle of light.

Besides, it doesn’t really matter what time I’m awake or asleep. The bird keeps watch during the day so sometimes at night I like to let him rest. I don’t have a fishing pole, of course, but without a table I have a lot of extra wood. Plus string, I use my phone charger as an extra-durable cable. I can’t cast it far but that’s fine because I don’t want to eat anything that’s too far out. Or at least, I don’t want to try to catch it.

On an unrelated note, last night I drank the last of the wine.

Sometimes I think I can see the dead thing pulsating in the night. I wake up when the world’s still deep in pitch dark and I go over to open and lean out the window. I imagine that I’ll see him crawling back towards the water, to be with his kind or to float away or simply to die at peace. But he never does. He just lays there, silent. Does he know he’s dead? If so, why does he keep crying out to me?

If I was braver, I would push him into the water. But he knows I’m not, gods never are.

When you catch a fish, you have to cut it up to eat it. Pull out the spine, the nerves, the brain if it happens to have one. I normally pull the eyes out first. I don’t want it looking at me all judgy. I don’t want it seeing what’s happening to itself. I read somewhere that dying people usually avoid mirrors.

Thank God I still have the old school CD player from the basement, I normally turn that on when I’m cleaning the fish corpse. It puts my mind at ease, it takes me back to the memory of my old corporate job. Taking lives is a bit like sorting paperwork. It must be done absentmindedly, or with some dramatically good outcome on the mind. Otherwise, you’ll be too aware of what you’re doing and it will kill you.

I stare at the fish on the cutting board in front of me. I haven’t taken the eyes out yet. His throat pulsates with the things he wants to say. Not even him, but the other ones, the already dead ones, the ones who could now only speak through him.

I had never killed a living thing, before living on this island. But now I have just the right knife for it, and I’ve found just the spot in the neck—is that what you call it on a fish—where if I make a clean slice just so, there’s barely any bleeding. Clean, easy. I’ve done this slice many times by now. Ella Fitzgerald plays in the background. The fish forgets to scream.

I use the thistles from my hairbrush to scrap off the remaining gunk on the fish meat. I don’t need the brush anyway. I threw out the mirror a while ago.

I check on the dead thing on the side of the house. Surprisingly, he hasn’t washed away. And aside from the bird, nothing’s come to eat him. At least, I don’t think. His body is a lump of decaying ink, tar-like and stiff but somehow doesn’t smell. I stare at him closely, his gnarly peeling skin, splitting open over his network of nerves and shy, calcified bones. Apparently he did have them after all, or at least his corpse does. He’s too ugly to be the Devil.

Bending down, I pluck off a chunk of his mass, unable to tell if it’s part of a leg or the body or the head. When I walk into the kitchen the bird is waiting for me at the window. I offer him the dried-up skin and he pecks at it and turns away. I’ve offended my ancestors.

With a sigh I open the garbage and drop the fractured piece of corpse inside.

The government said they’re coming but they haven’t. They’re not at all or they haven’t yet. Some days I can’t decide.

I could establish my own society here, if I wanted. On this island. Raise up a new race, a race of bird-people, teach them whatever I wanted was God. A shoe, a picture of Ella Fitzgerald, me. I could tell them it was the sea.

Some days I think I can hear the rescue team on their way. Other days I think it’s just the wind.

I had a nightmare last night. The water receded.

We’re all afraid of change.

The next morning, as I walk around the house, I discover that the dead thing is gone. His black body is nowhere in night, just an inky stain where he had been. I start to cry and the bird flies away, probably sits on the chimney. I can hear him rolling his eyes at me.

Stupid girl, he thinks.

I correct him. Stupid god.

I’m sucking on a piece of salmon—it’s not salmon but I call it salmon, I don’t know what the different fish are. The ocean lets out a scream and I choke on the salmon. I cough it back up and the bird looks at me with judgement. I glare at him and look towards the window.

The screaming continues. It could be a storm, or a helicopter, or a wave. I imagine a tsunami swallowing up the house and spitting out my bones with a giant belch to drift to the bottom of the sea. I pray it rips out my eyes first. The sound could be an airplane or a boat, I tell myself. Or thunder. The sound could be the end.

Here it is: I have decided that everything about my entire existence can be summed up in whether or not I decide to take a look.

And then I start to walk outside.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Molly Collins 2025