"Still Water" by Winona Morris

Still Water

by Winona Morris

Nobody drowned in Harrow Slough. That was the first thing Tessa Voss learned when her mother moved them south. The old families stated it as fact, the same way they’d state that the sky is blue or snakes don’t like salt. Nobody drowns in that water.

That didn’t mean nobody ever died there. That just meant the water doesn’t take what doesn’t come willingly.

She was twelve then and thought nothing of it. She was thirty-one when she finally understood.

The slough was black as a cast-iron skillet, a testament to tannins and time. On a still afternoon it would go dark as space, and it looked solid, like you could walk across it if you believed hard enough.

Tessa had learned not to look at it too long. She’d focus on the spanish moss dripping from the cypress trees along its edge instead. Looking too long was how you started seeing things.

It was her neighbor, Cloris Dubois, who taught her not to look. “It shows what you want to see,” Cloris said, shelling purple hull peas on the porch. “And what it shows you is true. That’s what makes it wicked.”

Tessa laughed. Cloris didn’t.

Tessa thought she was dreaming the first time she saw her father in the water. He’d been dead and buried three states northward for going on eleven years by then, but there he was. He was sitting in a kitchen chair, just below the surface, looking up at her with a half-crooked smile.

She stepped back and went inside.

The second time, her daughter was there, with the grandpappy she never knew. Lilly Rose was alive and well, taking an afternoon nap in the back bedroom to escape the oppressive, wet heat. Lilly Rose was also somehow there, beneath the black water, sitting beside him. Both of them wore the same half-crooked smile. 

Tessa sat in her porch rocker for a long while after that, pondering what she had seen.

It was a trick of light, or a trick of grief, or a trick of southern humidity. The water stayed still, and she convinced herself of a great many things.

She asked Cloris about it the next day, sitting with the old woman, helping her shell her peas until both their fingers were as purple as the hulls they were stripping clean.

“It made you feel peaceful, didn’t it?” Cloris asked when Tessa finished talking. Tessa said that it had. 

“It always does,” Cloris said. “That’s the point.”

Tessa asked what she should do, and Cloris offered that there wasn’t much that could be done. She should just stay away from the water when it was still. Never go near the water after dark. Never look at the water when she was lonesome.

“And if it ever shows you yourself, Tessa, you just grab that baby of yours and leave. Don’t even stop to pack, just go.”

Tessa asked what happened if someone stayed after seeing themselves.

“The Harrow Slough ain’t never had a drowning. Not once in the hundred-forty-some-odd years that records have been kept. You tell me why that is?”

Tessa went to the water at dusk. It’s not dark, she told herself. It’s barely even dusk. Practically still afternoon.

She looked away from the spanish moss, deep into the water.

Her father. Her daughter. Herself.

She was there, sitting between them, just under the black water that wasn’t truly black, but deep brown, like old amber. The color of preserved things.

Under that glassy sheen she looked unworried, unguarded, happy. There were no lines around her eyes, no creases by her lips. Her shoulders did not slump under the weight of living. She was smiling, not the fake smile she had perfected, but the real one she had forgotten she could wear.

The water was deep and dark, and perfectly still.

In the house behind her, Lilly Rose slept and didn’t know her mother had gone to the water. 

The door to the house stayed open all night, and the next morning Cloris found Lilly Rose alone in the kitchen. She was eating cereal and asking when her mama was coming back.

“Your mama ain’t coming back, doll-baby,” Cloris said, stroking the young girl’s hair. “She went to the water and found something she needed.”

Lilly Rose looked out the window toward the slough. “I dreamed about Mama last night,” she said. “She was smiling. She’s pretty when she smiles.”

Cloris said nothing. She took the child’s bowl and washed it and stood at the kitchen window for a while, watching the black water and its mirrored stillness.

Even at this distance she didn’t look too long, because she was old enough, and just lonesome enough, to know exactly what it would show her.