The Anatomy of Drowning (ONC 2022 Longlist)

1. Early Spring, 1985

By the time Vera came back to her body, the water had reached her ears.

It cradled her skull and slid it's way between her shoulder-blades, just under the collar of her shirt. Vera laid there, unable to move, waiting for her mind to reach her body to tell it that water was soaking into her clothes but the space in her consciousness was always seconds ahead of her limbs.

Vera waited for the pins and needles to slip away from under her skin and when they did she reached a hand across her stomach and up to her temple to touch the left side of her face, her ear. Her fingers came away wet and the contact of skin on skin, in the fading wave of needles, hurt down to her bones.

But the ache felt good.

The ache meant she was alive.

Good, came the voice in her head like a shallow kiss, start counting, you're floating away.

She shivered against it. The voice belonged to Sydney but it wasn't Sydney who spoke to her now, it could and would never be Sydney. Just a passing memory of a trick learned to help when the mind wandered to places it shouldn't.

All the same, Vera listened and started counting: one knee, five toes, nine fingers, twelve bones at the top of her spine and five at the base. She counted all the places her body made contact with the floor until the scene resolved around her.

The ache meant she was alive.

The wood under her body meant she wasn't on the ship but in the house, on the floor, in the present, with water dripping onto her skin from somewhere above her.

From the hole in the ceiling of Arthurs living room.

Vera pulled herself up to her elbows and sat up, limbs sluggish. The room was dark, save for the moonlight in the window but she could see the wet spot where the water had soaked into the cushions. Had it been raining when she'd fallen asleep? She couldn't remember.

Everything in her head felt foggy, out of focus. Adrift. The way words sometimes felt on the end of her tongue. There but not. A symptom she'd carry, according to the scans, for the rest of her life because brains were fragile things when they went without oxygen.

Vera pulled herself up from the floor trying to ignore the wet clothes that clung to her skin as she moved, but the material was cold and heavy. The pressure of the wet cotton settled something in Vera even as she fought a shiver. Sometimes it took some time to come back. Sometimes she got stuck and the dreams followed her into reality.

She caught her reflection in the dark glass.

She was alone and in her dreams she was never really alone.

Between the metronome beat of the leaking ceiling and the wet squish of her clothes, Vera listened as her feet made soft pillowed sounds on the wood under her toes. The rug hadn't been there in months. Moved to accommodate a wheelchair and a healing limp. She hadn't touched the wheelchair in days but she considered it now, if only to wave off the parts of her body that ached from being on the floor.

But the thought slipped through her finger, there and gone. Forgotten. She leaned into the couch instead, and then the arm chair, then the wall. Moving through the dark. She drifted further into the house, placing her hand flat on the wallpaper there, fingers splayed out.

As she does, her finger tips brush over a photograph of her expedition crew, smiling faces and the bright hope of adventure, the future she no longer has.

Because they had gone out and only she had come back.

You're floating away. Vera wrapped an arm around her middle leaning further into the wall as if she could fall into it; slip into the shadows and never come out again. Ten toes, she counted, two heels, all twenty-seven bones in her right hand.