There is one beneath the water, whom I love.

Each night I am called to the blackness where he dwells. Come. My belly is swollen with the love I bring to him. I shift through the black sand and trudge through the black mud at the water’s edge. It suckles on my smooth white feet. Squelch, squelch. The lake is black as oil, but the things its darkness holds are known to me. Weeds grow thick in the water and the wet earth below. Pale eyeless fish float between them, and nameless half-things grope through the bitter sludge. Scum clings slick to the surface, bobbing, and fogs of insects drone and sway above it. Such life lives here in this place, for my love to feed.

I walk without stopping. The cold night bites my bare skin, but the water will be warm. A splash, and I have entered it, its heat that pulses through me. I slosh through the shallows. The soil dips beneath me, soft with each step, oozing. There is no resistance, only wet and warmth and welcome. The water slides over my knees, my thighs, my hips, my swollen stomach, and I gasp. I clutch myself there. The love I bear within me begins its stirring. He is close, then. The things of the water follow me where I walk now. Those pallid fish mill blindly in my wake, those nameless creatures crawl between my toes, and the scum and the weeds all clutch at me as I pass. They are my lover’s beckoning caress, the chitter of flies his whisper in my ear. Come.

I go towards the depths at the water’s heart. The lake envelops me, arms, chest, shoulders. It slips up my neck, clasps my cheeks, laps upon my lips. I open my mouth and let the smooth black liquid run into me. Soft as milk it is, and hot as blood, trickling over tooth and tongue and on to the throat to be swallowed down just gently. When I can swallow no more the water passes down and into my lungs, brimming them up until no breath can enter them. The black lake fills me. I am calm. Breathing is nothing. His love will keep me living. He stirs beneath me now. Come.

The soil splits and swirls beneath my toes, and thick supple arms come darting out of the depths to wrap about my body, my limbs, my neck, engulfing me, so many of them, so strong, so tough and smooth, like rubber. The water is tugged over my eyes. I keep them open, I would look upon him, but there is only black. I sink. Down, my whole weight goes, down into dirt and darkness, slow, slow, slow. The mud drinks me, and I cannot move. That world of water becomes a well of tar, and there is only me, and only him, and my love for him, to which I give myself. I can feel his heat and his form and his strength, gripping me too tight to stir beneath. I long to reach out, hold him, give him my love, but my limbs hang numb and slack. He clings so close to me, his arms snaking over my skin, up towards my face, worming into my mouth and nose, pressing apart my jaw until it aches, driving into my throat and down, down, further down, striving for home somewhere deep below.

He is all about me. Those strong arms fill me with him, root me to him, nourish me, sate my inmost secret hungers. They do not let go. It is a good embrace. It makes us one. It makes me whole. Deep down, in my gut, he has found my love, the seeds he left to grow when last I came. They stir now. He pumps them, one by one, up through his arms, and I feel them come up through me, pulsing by my stomach, my heart, my throat. Each one an egg made whole in having dwelt inside me. It is good, so good at last, that I give of my love, that I feed him, and feed the live things of the water. I would stay with him, here in the warm and windless dark. I would stay and be held and never want for love.

When they are all gone back to him, he releases me. There’s a fear and the shock of the cold. My mind swims.

I wake when the night is done, and the grey sun swells out of the grey earth. I sprawl face down in the wet sand, my head towards shore, the lakewater slapping at my feet. A fierce and chill wind rakes across my back. When I try to stand, water gushes forth from my mouth, and I fall to my hands and knees to retch as it tumbles out of me, bitter, green-tinged black, thick with grit that cuts my tender gums. When the air rushes back into me, it’s a stinging cold. My throat and lungs burn and chafe with it, and I cough and hack and splutter, wheezing. My skin is damp and wrinkled and speckled with rough black sand. It peels away in places, where his arms have held me, as I pad over the grass back home. My lips drip blood. My muscles ache. My hair is stiff and dank and straggling. I hunch against the cold and lashing wind as the pale sun lurches through the pale sky at my back, leeched of warmth.

The nights are long. They leave me weak and bare. The days are dim. And weak and bare I stay. My belly will swell again before night falls. All of it will pass that way again. That love that is not mine will grow in me. I will hear his call. It will chitter on the breeze, and drone on the storm. Come. I will go to his water. He will find me, fill me, claim my love, and leave more love for me to grow for him. Sick me up onto shore like swallowed rot. I will wake beneath timid dawn, and cower alone till black dusk shrouds the sky. Till the time has come to visit him, again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Come.

Sometimes, when the day is brighter, I wake from it all. Once meek memories gain courage to creep into the light. It is never the same, remembering it like that. That lake of scum, the filth that thrives in it. The deep dark dirt. The one who dwells beneath it. His arms like leather and wet clay, slithering, strangling. Screams somewhere in the back of a skull, unheard, unsounded. Remembering like that, there is no love to feel, but only fear. A fear that grows in me, and calls me to him. Come.

Such memories will darken even the brightest days. They can shine some light in the blackest nights as well. Not with the cleansing heat and glow of flame. But perhaps cool phosphoresence, enough to see by. It is not so dark down there, when I remember, deep in the foul black earth beneath the water. Not so dark to pitch me into blindness. Sometimes, if I look, I can see him plain as daylight. It is a frightening thing, to peer into dimly recollected darks and see no monster. Only my own face looking back at me. Seeing, knowing, calling me home again. Come.

Sometimes I keep from the water, for a while. But ever, in time, I’ll answer all the same. And on nights like that, even the deepest love burns with hate. And I hate him. I hate him. I hate him so. Him beneath the water, whom I love.

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Sarah Davidson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors