Drowning

David Mulry

Photo by Yannis Papanastasopoulos on Unsplash

As his kayak cut through the murmur of water, he tried to forget, but it was hard. He could do it for stretches of time. Short stretches.

He stared at the long flowing water weed as he passed. On the surface, white blooms of hawthorn blossom scattered near the bank like confetti from old vows. Below, the green strands heaved in the current, slick and sinuous, reminding him of eels.

Kingfishers clung to low branches, watching, their eyes following sharp hungry beaks. They understood the predatory eddies and the pools where life hid and quivered and spent itself in a flash. There they dropped, iridescent, exploding into movement with a snap of wings and a coiled plunge.

Where the weed trailed off into blooms of space, fish hung in the current. Here a heavy chub, there what looked like a trout, speckles across its flanks, and every so often a marauding pack of silver dace, scattering like splinters of light.

At the slightest provocation they would shiver apart in quick fragments, then find their way back again, through winding coils of green river weed. He wished he could come back together like that.

The river was uneventful until they reached the weir. It wasn’t particularly big. Just enough to form a thick wave powerful enough to play in. Sunshine, tricks and acrobatics, and a test of skill. Worth the paddle for an hour or two of distraction.

There, the water curled across the lip and plunged. Where it fell, it turned back on itself the way water does—and held balance. The current above and the returning water below met in a churning trough at the lip. Everything stopped there.

That’s why they had come. There, you could dip the nose of the kayak and stand the boat up and pirouette lazily. You could hang the blade of your paddle in the water and surf across the wave, buffeting on it. Cutting across like a skater caught mid-glide. You could laugh, and play, and forget there.

He had lost himself, for a moment. The words, the noise, the resentment all gone. Surfing the swell, smiling, he made the unfamiliar boat pop out of the wave, laughed with the others, and punched clumsily towards the slack water near the bank. He leaned into the cut of the kayak’s sharp belly, but the paddle stroke that was meant to set him aright dropped into thick, binding weed.

He tipped fully before he realized what was happening. The paddle was stuck now between his body and the weed, but he didn’t need it to roll, even in this unfamiliar boat. Instead, he angled his hips to orient against the water, one hand searching for the water’s resistance. His fingers sank into the slick windings of weed.

It swirled about him. Long, undulating, hungry.

He tried again, even though he understood now that he would not make the roll. He was too bound up. The slack water where the hawthorns wept white confetti, where their blossom would, in time, rot and turn brown, was choked with heavy coils. Weed, thick enough to walk on almost. Thick enough to bury him.

Even then he didn’t panic. He reached for the release strap on his deck. The others would laugh at him when he came up wet and coughing, forced to capsize like a novice.

But he was no stranger to the inelegant exit. He had capsized his boat the very first time he had tried kayaking, years before. It had been a winter day. The water was swift and brown, not like this crystal water, bejeweled in the sunlight, summer-warm, and thick with weed, like hair from a folk-tale.

He had come up in that cold, brown river, clutching at the hard toggle on the back of his boat, grinning and choking. She had been with him then. She laughed out loud, and he had flashed a wet smile in her direction.

Now he was alone, and he knew it was over.

He knew it for sure when he pulled the neoprene deck cover free and gripped the cockpit of his borrowed kayak and pushed. And pushed. And his left foot stuck fast, caught on something deep in the guts of the boat.

His hands fumbled. He pushed against the footrest again—remembered it hadn’t adjusted properly, but he hadn’t paid attention. He hadn’t cared enough to check it when they set out.

He wrenched his leg. Nothing. Still, he did not panic. Instead, he twisted sideways to see if the buoyancy jacket would be enough to tilt him towards air. Sunlight, fractured, prismatic, was just beyond the surface of the water, near and impossibly far away, out beyond the coils of mussed and tangled weed that wrapped about him like lover’s hair.

***

He was still in the water when the first kayak hit him. He barely registered the hands, but someone reached urgently across and down and pulled at him. Another was there too, helping on the other side, against the weight of water, and the heavier pull of weed.

The river released him reluctantly, and clumsy, unfamiliar lips closed on his. A moment later he coughed and spluttered in the bright sun, retching as others held him.

On the bank, he sat in the sun breathing in and out, his paddle and upended boat some yards away. Someone was at his back, their arms still wrapped about him protectively, while he picked absently at green strands clinging to his wetsuit, at thick weeds draped about his neck.

He leant into the person behind him, and felt their grip tighten. Wordlessly, he turned his gaze to the dappling river and the perfect hungry geometry of the churning swell where he had drowned. Nearly.

There, he thought he heard something, a susurration, a whisper, and for a moment, for the smallest stretch, the water and the winding weed sighed of heart’s-ease, or something very like it.

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David Mulry studied at the University of Kent, at Canterbury, and teaches literature at the College of Coastal Georgia. He lives on a few acres where, when he is not writing, he raises sheep, goats, and chickens, and tries not to be stung (too much) by his bees. He is currently working on a novel.