The Memory of Water
C.M. Scott
Since it drowned, my hometown is clumsy with ghosts. Each step is a tumble through dream decay and barbed longing.
It’s different now—being surrounded by water you can’t drink; being thirsty in the sort of way that clamps the back of your neck and rubs your eyes dry. Everywhere, the ground is a mirror and the upside-down woods where the park once stood always seem more tangible than the trees themselves. It’s the blurriness, when narrowed down. It’s the refusal to stay straightened. I’m in love with their crookedness in a selfish sort of way because I need to believe there are other ways of being beyond stiff vertebrae.
I’ve always been one step in my own dimension, letting the current run through my legs from one place to the next. It’s all mixed up for me and I’ve only learned the difference by listening real closely. I was an adult when I learned that other people couldn’t know them the way I do—the ghosts, I mean. They see indents in street light slivers. They may feel the lag of air and hear muffled dankness when walking through an apparition. That’s about that, though. I just thought everyone else was a lot better at ignoring them, or that I was always leaning on the edge of dying, like pressing down on a balloon and waiting for your hand to slam through into the table. They like balloons. Did you know that? It’s wet spaghetti against the wall and they can push them around a bit with their ectoplasmic breath. It’s the unexpected details like this that I wonder if I should keep to myself. It feels like a secret I’ve been invited into, and I don’t have the solidarity to share stories like this.
I feel them in my metal fillings. The static drills into my molars, and I’m chewing on radio waves half my life because they’re so desperate to be heard. They stand at the foot of my bed when I’m asleep, and my dreams aren’t my own anymore. I see screaming babies and feel the final hugs from parting mothers. I smell deckled body bloat and hear the cries of gulls stripping water-logged skin. And then I wake up and act like I can just move on from that the way a balanced person should be able to.
Over by the softball marsh, I always taste bubblegum and I don’t know what happened in that ghost’s life to make that their defining memory. Bubblegum—its last footprint on our conscience. What a way to be. I guess it’s not so bad when you consider everyone who dies without leaving any bit of themselves behind. There are theories, of course, but we’re all just guessing until we reach the end of the script and touch the corners of the waterfall earth with our clawed hands.
Water is a tenacious cradle. It bites and burrows. Like murmurations of cars in traffic, it invades relentlessly. Droplets melt into the whole and shed their carefully sculpted menisci and who can measure where molecules go from there? Do the molecules know what’s happening to them? Hold memories of what it was to be apart? I think so, if only because small water always huddles itself into droplets, scared, like it’s tucking its toes in on a packed subway and trying everything possible not to bump into anyone. They jump into themselves so quickly, once they touch. What does that say about us?
C.M. SCOTT is a neurodivergent writer from the Pacific Northwest with an MFA from Western Washington University. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Dark Matter Magazine, Snarl, Ghost City Review, The Disappointed Housewife, On the Run, and more. You can follow them on Twitter @smarted_pants