EnvyNanna
Since the day her mother pulled her, blue-lipped and still, from the bottom of a lake at age six, Dovina has understood a truth she can never say aloud without sounding mad: The water ants her dead.
It began small. A bath drawn to a comfortable temperature that turned, in the span between one breath and the next, to something that seared her skin red - and her mother, always, nearby to haul her out, murmuring apologies to the faucet.
Then the winters, when snow melting on her collar burned her like a brand, blistering... Though it burned no one else.
Then the ordinary glass of water at dinner, rising to meet her throat before she'd even swallowed, her mother's hand slamming between her shoulder blades while the rest of the table simply watched a girl cough.
Twenty years of this. Twenty years of her mother standing, wet-handed and unquestioning, between her daughter and a substance that makes up sixty percent of the girl she's trying to save.
Her mother has never explained it. But there are things Dovina has noticed, the way a child notices what adults think they've hidden well: the photograph of a grandmother she never met, water-stained at the edges, that her mother will not discuss. The way her mother flinches at the sound of a bath running two floors away. The single sentence, offered once, half-drunk, and never repeated - "She went in the tub too, you know. My mother. They said her heart just stopped." - followed by a silence so total it felt like punishment for having heard it.
No ritual. No incantation. No family curse spoken aloud and broken by the final page of a bible. Just a pattern that predates her, and a mother who seems to know its shape without ever naming it.
Now her mother is dying. And Dovina, thirty years old and still flinching from rain, must spend her mother's final months as the only barrier left between herself and something with no motive she can locate, no myth she can slay, no mermaid to blame,