Drown-Haunted

My mother had a shrine to God in the basement before the flood came. Candles. Statuary. The golden tabernacle. Stained glass looked out on concrete foundation, no portal to a drier world. She’s still down there, bones picked clean by river fish, snapping turtles risen from swamps. She thought prayer would save her, an invisible, tide-halting dome cast over the house. I’ve seen her hollow, skeletal remains. A scuba mask and snorkel borrowed from a neighbor.

The other version of her sits on the roof, ghost shimmer radiating off translucent skin, eyes black, flood waters lapping at gable ends. The men and women who once lived in town drop anchor at the house’s edge, asking for mother’s blessing. No other house is drown-haunted. The rest of the neighborhood is abandoned.

I tie up to a leafless tree, life sucked from bark-shorn trunk.

We weren’t close those last years, but I’ll never forget the shrine, the childhood hours spent kneeling at the foot of God, Their wings of bleached marble, Their dozen eyes staring into my soul, weighing sins.

“My husband, he’s got the Cough,” a woman says once her outboard chokes silent.

“My boy, the Mold is in his blood,” another says.

“My wife, she sees the Man Who Isn’t There. He says things to her, asks her to follow. I need Him gone. I need…”

My mother looks at each, draws the Circle in the air, and motions to the horizon. She rarely speaks, regardless of offering. Hunks of meat and polished stone, small statutes mimicking those drowned beneath the house, foxed paperback copies of romance novels she once bought from the grocery store.

I heard enough boat-spread rumors. Waterlogged gossip.  How their boy recovered. How the Cough dried. How the Man stopped speaking to the wife, no longer offering his hand to that other world.

Not everything could be healed, but most she managed.

Prayers hadn’t saved mom, but they saved something in her, dead undying. And I needed that something, because, like everyone who visits, I too need something. But I told myself I’d never ask her for another thing. But that was when she still drew breath. When I was still young. When my own son was free of the Mold that colonized the young.

I’d come at the end of days and watch. The words passed, outboards churning, Circle drawn again and again.

Then I steer my skiff home, to the raised rooms where my son slumbers, eyes fever-fluttered, the mottled green growth crawling over his chest, dancing in his fingertips.

I repeat the trip, marking the path like a pilgrim to a temple. I know the prayers. She’d etched them into my gray matter, laying each down like steel bars over gaping windows. Indoctrination is a hard hawk to vanish.

The sun rises.

The sun sets.

When the creeping growth creeps up his neck, there is no waiting.

She smiles when she sees me at the roof’s edge, black eyes cast over us, tongue wandering lips. Something stirs behind her teeth, but I can’t name what. My son lies in the bow, head lolling against the gunnel.

“You know I wouldn’t come unless I needed to,” I say.

“Son?” she asks, nodding, pointing to my son, his face almost identical to hers.

“Yes.”

“Sick?”

“Also yes. Can you…”

“For bones.”

I don’t know what she’s asking.

“For bones,” she says again, pointing below, through water, through the house. I’ve never heard her ask anything of anyone, no bartering for miracles.

“Really?” I ask.

She nods and points at my son.

I understand.

The goggles and snorkel are in the center compartment. I tighten the adjustable strap around my head, rubber mouthpiece between lips. I tell my son I’ll be back, then lower myself into the water. It’s warm, like everything is warm.

The door to my childhood home is torn away, the threshold a gaping maw. I swim inside, kicking, hands pulling me through the water to where basement steps descend. The filtered light is yellow and green dripping through blown-out windows. As I drop lower, light fades to a sickly gray, only the smallest slits for foundation windows. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to see the shrine, God’s marble wings coated in algae, the once polished tabernacle tarnished, tiny fish swimming in and out of their shrunken architecture. And she is there, where I last saw her, skull face down at the foot of the shrine, ribcage coated in snails. I gather what I can, tibia and fibula and pelvis, and kick back to the surface, drifting through our old living room, our drowned kitchen. I deposit what I carried into the boat before diving again, repeating the process until all of my mother is retrieved.

“That’s everything,” I say.

She nods and draws the Circle in the air, over my son, over me.

“Is that it?” I ask.

She nods. “Take them.”

“Your bones?”

She nods again. “With you.”

As she speaks, I can already see the Mold receding over my son’s flesh, skin reverting to the paleness of youth.

“Why?” I ask.

“Penance,” she says.

As I start our engine and steer us away, I almost expect my mother to float out over the water, following in our wake. But she stands there, at the edge of our roof. I wave. She doesn’t wave back.

Some things never change.

Some things do.

Her bones rattle in the bottom of the boat, ready for a new shrine, a new home.

* * *

Ⓒ Corey Farrenkopf