Stella Lei
You aren’t born yet when the town drowns, but every spring, your family drives forty minutes to the lake that formed over it, the dam looming in the distance. You go despite the gates, the signs proclaiming health hazards, no swimming. You aren’t sure if it’s even legal to be on the property, but your parents never face problems as they park a few miles away and hike to the shore. It is always the third weekend of May, when humidity settles in the creases of your joints, and heat brews the lakewater into something almost noxious, yet sickly-sweet. You know by the time you are eight that there is a reason for this ritual. You ask your mother as she fastens the straps of her sun hat, her gaze pinned to the dam.
“Your Baba and I, we lived here once.” The straps form a bow that bobs in the stagnant air. “In the town under the water,” she says. “We got married in the church, and we lived right next to the elementary school. It was really a lovely place, then.” She fits her sunglasses on her face, even though the sky is muddled with clouds, and the conversation ends.
Instead of joining your parents as they walk along the shore, you kneel at the water’s edge and peer into the murk. You pick up a nearby stick and prod the algae that scums the surface, pushing it aside to reveal a school of tadpoles. They flit through the water, twitching, only their motion distinguishing them from mud. In their midst, a frog emerges. It swims jaggedly toward you, its movement hindered by something obscured in the muck. As it surfaces, you realize that one of its hind legs seems split in two, that an extra, smaller appendage flails off to the side. You stare at the creature, unsure of whether to back away or touch it, whether to acknowledge the deformity, to take it home, to save it somehow, if that was even possible. The frog’s glassy eyes stare up at you before its body shudders, and it darts back into the lake.
***
“Where did the other people in the town go?” you ask your father while he smokes on the porch. You are ten now, and your family is set to make its annual trip next week.
“I don’t know.” He ashes his cigarette. “We stayed nearby, obviously, but many people had to go much further. Our neighbors, I think, stayed temporarily with their family in Minnesota, but I don’t know where they went next. Some people didn’t make it out.”
The sunset burns, a technicolor blaze fueled by chemical fumes. Your father opens his mouth, and you think he’ll add something, why only your family steeps in the industrial waste around the dam, tied to this ghost of a town, but he merely takes the cigarette between his lips. The cherry glows, a second sun.
***
By the time you are thirteen, you have long known of the complications your mother faced while birthing you. Six months in, preeclampsia ratcheted up her blood pressure and attacked her kidneys, forcing her to get a transplant while your tiny preterm body lay in the NICU. Even before this, she endured a seven-year long series of miscarriages. She told you this after you asked one too many times why you had no siblings, her eyes boring into your face as she said, “Keeping one child is hard enough.” Though you’d overlooked it before, your mother’s age stared out at you from her tired eyes. She and your father are twenty-some years older than the parents of your peers, and it is only their still-black hair that keeps people from mistaking them for your grandparents. The little that you know about their lives before you floats together in a web of offhand details and omissions, making a portrait with the face left out.
What went unsaid about your birth was the number of failed attempts, the number of times she bled out slowly in the bathroom, telling herself next time would be the one. When you did the math, you found that the maximum number was twelve: eighty-four months, five months per pregnancy. Though you’re sure the number is much lower, that nobody would undergo such an ordeal so many times, something about your mother’s face tells you that she would have done it. That she would have withstood every cost.
You think about this number often, when you buy things by the dozen, when you watch the hands on a clock. What you try not to consider is the fact that, had any of those fetuses lived, you would not exist right now.
***
Often, you feel as though your mother is no longer looking at you but past you, as if her eyes glance off your face and land somewhere your body can never reach. When she asks how class went, how your friends are, what you’d like for dinner, her mouth creases at the corners. She drives you to swim practice in silence and never stays for your meets. Afterward, you emerge from the Y with your hair tangled and the air around you chlorine-sharp, and she watches you walk across the parking lot from her car, a towel on the backseat so you don’t get anything wet. “How far do you think you can swim now?” she asks you after you’ve won first in the 50 meter butterfly. You rub the swimmer’s silhouette emblazoned on your medal. You are not a distance swimmer, but you don’t want to disappoint her either.
“A few miles, definitely.”
She nods and says nothing more, but her eyes remain on your reflection in the rearview. Though she watches you more often—glancing at you over her shoulder, gazing at you while you eat, hovering at your bedroom door—you can’t dismiss the feeling that her eyes are elsewhere, fixated not on you but your shadow.
When you get home, she lingers by your side as you unpack your bags and throw your swimsuit in the sink. You lather it with soap and wash by hand as she prepares dinner in the next room. The door is open, but you do not speak, electing instead to pad to the kitchen counter when you are done. You scoop rice into the rice cooker’s bowl and rinse it twice, then slot it into place and switch the cooker on. You turn to your mother and she nods once, dismissing you. She does not pause in her chopping, or frying, or fussing over the contents of the fridge. You almost want to slam something, to shock her into looking at you head-on, but instead you recede to your room, alone.
The house quiets after dinner, the silence only broken by the hum of the dramas your parents watch together in the evenings. They are completely in Chinese, in a dialect you never learned but that you sometimes hear your parents use on the phone, a sound that swings and bends beyond the shape of your tongue. On one of the few times you try to join your parents in this evening ritual, the woman on screen stands on a scaffold, a length of rope tied around her waist. The camera pans to a young boy—her son—standing on the ground below, tears in his eyes. Devoid of language, the scene is inexplicable even as you return to it years later, but you understand one thing as she spreads her arms and smiles down at her son: trust me. She jumps. You walk away before you can see the aftermath, whether she crashes to the concrete or careens above, finally able to fly, but the image replays in your mind as you try to sleep. The breathless moment at the height of her ascent, the knowledge that her next action will change everything.
You see her again as you stand on the diving block at your next swim practice. Though it is mere feet above the water, your stomach plunges as you raise your arms above your head. The coach’s whistle pierces the air, and you jump.
***
Being in the water calms you, especially on the days you don’t have practice and you walk to the YMCA after school, immersing yourself in hours where the only horizon is the upcoming wall and the same black tiles guide you from end to end. You swim slowly on these days, with no coach on the sidelines and no competitors on the periphery to goad you on. Each time, you try to count how many laps you’ve swam, but the numbers begin to blur around thirty or forty, and you give up in favor of embracing the quiet monotony of each stroke.
The pool is chlorinated to an extreme, likely to compensate for the pollution in the nearby water, and the smell has permeated your skin, hair, and most of your clothes. Your mother wrinkles her nose when she thinks you can’t see, but she never voices her disdain. She lights candles around the house—jasmine, gardenia, sweet tea rose—which line the tables and shelves in various states of melt, dots of wax pearling on the wood. She burns them long into the night such that the house looks like a memorial in the dark, everything cast in a flickering light. Though you can’t explain why, you never invite your swim team friends over, and your parents ask after them only in the abstract: What did you guys do today? Was practice hard? Do you feel ready for your next meet? You nod as you sip your water: The same drills as before. No, it was alright, I’m not too tired. Yes, it’s next Saturday, remember?
As a new environmental initiative launches to clean the town’s waterways, conversation veers again and again toward the lake. The other girls chatter about it in the locker room, though you’re sure none of them have actually gone, that their laughter would fade into tense smiles if you mentioned your family’s annual trips. “I mean, since there’s a town down there, what if all the garbage from the landfills washed up into the water, and that’s why things are so gross?”
“Maybe. I heard there was some nuclear power plant, and the chemicals have never broken down.”
“Wait, there was a town in there this whole time?” someone to your right asks, and you stare steadily at your hairbrush as someone else laughs.
“Of course there is, how could you not know that?”
On the drive home that evening, you are tempted to ask your mother what happened, to push for a full answer this time, but the pollution is not something you’ve ever discussed out loud, much less in terms of its source. Instead, you’ve learned about it only through its aftermath—the medication your mother takes for her blood pressure, the slow movement of her throat as she swallows.
A new mythology soon emerges from the lake. It is a distorted reflection of the reality you’ve seen over the past fifteen years: mutation, water that glows green at night, wildlife that lurks beneath the surface and stares out with dozens of eyes. Your friend describes sores that erupted out of someone’s mouth after they drank the water in a fit of desperation—my parents told me about it like a million years ago—and your other friend dares her to try it and see what happens, since you’ve been wanting to call out sick from class anyway.
“You’re both full of shit,” you say, but you run your tongue against the roof of your mouth, remembering the frog from all those years ago, the way it jerked through the water, each movement choked off at the end.
***
Two years after you make the varsity swim team, you are back on the porch with your father, though the smoking is less frequent now and largely a secret from your mother. I’m a part-time retired smoker, is what he usually says when he leans against the wall and lights up, your mother at work or the supermarket or wherever else the day has taken her. This time, though, he stays quiet. He turns the cigarette between his fingers as it slowly becomes a column of ash.
“I just don’t understand,” you begin, “why she’s so set on going, when we know what the toxins are doing to her.” It’s an argument your parents have repeated over the years, their voices leaking through their bedroom door as you stand in the hall.
Your father drops the cigarette, not having smoked any of it. For a moment, there is only the whisper of his shoe against ash. “You had a sister, once,” he says. The wind draws a breath through the trees. “Before the dam was built. Her name was Erica.”
You stare off the side of the porch long after your father has slouched back into the house and closed the sliding door. The scent of smoke lingers in the air behind him. Birds soar overhead, and you watch their wings break through the shadows of branches, like their feathers are emerging from the leaves. For the first time, you can feel the shape your shadow takes.
Armed with your newly-obtained license, you drive yourself out to the lake, even though the anniversary is months away. It’s your first time here alone, and it takes a while to find your way past the gates to the shore. Unlike all the other times you’ve been here, the water is cold, the mud thick with ice. You kneel and skim your palm across the surface, watching the ripples dissipate in the distance. There is no other disturbance, no bugs or frogs to join you. The air is silent and dead. You shed your jacket and take off your boots, their presence suddenly unbearably heavy. As the water embraces you, you close your eyes and push downward, reaching for something you cannot see but that you know must be there. You do this until your lungs grow tight and hot from lack of oxygen, and when you can bear it no longer, you gasp into the February air as splotches dance through your eyes. You inhale, one long stream of air, and do it again.
You shiver in the shower that evening, the goosebumps along your arms hard and red. You scratch them for hours into the night.
Looking at your mother the next morning, you find that her self-pity revolts you. You’ve never noticed it before, but now you see it in the too-fast way she dices onions, the crescents her nails leave in her palms, the lurch of her shoulders in the car. You want to reach out to her, but you are unsure of whether you’d end up embracing her or striking her across the face, so you sit still and let the silence envelope you both.
You continue watching her at the dinner table as your father talks about the busy season at his firm, the hours he’ll have to work into the night. You meld his face with your mothers, with your own, in your head, trying to imagine what your sister could look like, if the two of you would be visibly related, if her upper lip would also curl inward when she smiled. Your image of her shifts each time you look back up at your parents, and you wonder if you are growing into her face or away from it. When you get ready for bed, you run your fingers across each contour of your face and picture them in a slightly different shape.
***
After your third evening spent at the lake, you notice a hardening of your skin, your legs scaled and dry. Your skin is permanently cracked, and you blame it on the cold and the dry air, though you’ve never had this problem before, and blood pools where your skin splits across the backs of your hands. You slather them with watery three dollar lotion and ignore the sting it leaves. You return to the lake that weekend, and the next, and the next.
Though silt billows around you and there are no tiled lines to direct you forward, you feel instinctively that you know your way, that something in the submerged buildings is pulling you forward, guiding you. Your lung capacity expands, and you find that you can spend increasing amounts of time underwater without having to surface. You rush through the water fluently, as if this was your birthright, your first language. It’s a sensation you’ve felt before, at swim practice, when your coach told you to swim a lap as an example for the other kids—see how she uses her core to keep her body balanced—at the first meet you won, breathless, each nerve buzzing and alight. You imagine what Erica would have said in those moments after victory, whether she’d join you in the water when you didn’t have practice and race with you to the deep end. You hold onto this image as you swim, you and your sister’s hair tangling together in the current, her face awash in blue.
You soon find that your legs have become clumsy on land, less articulated in your knees. You grip the banister as you go down the stairs and stumble into the living room, where your parents sit in front of the TV. Their heads obscure the screen, but you can make out a song that drifts across the room, each note high and clear. You kneel at the bottom of the stairs as music settles around you, your body a creature whose habits you are trying to learn.
***
You start calling out sick from practice, telling your coach you’ll be back as soon as you feel better. “Muscle fatigue,” you tell him, or, “I was running a fever last night, but it’s broken for now.” Your friends ask you where you’ve been, when you’ll return to the pool, whether you’ll swim at the next meet. Shaking your head, you say, I’ve just been resting at home. Maybe next week. I’m not sure. You still sit with them at lunch and in study hall, chatting over slightly-burnt pizza and chemistry notes, but you feel a distance growing between you and your friends, as if you are an electron moving to another orbital, spinning in a new formation. You wonder what shift in energy catalyzed this change—whether it was a gain or a loss—where it will bring you next.
While your parents think you’re at practice, you sit on the lakeshore and watch for signs of life. Pebbles fill your palms, which relax around the heft of each stone. The sun settles lower in the sky, and you join the water, the cold a welcome embrace.
On the last weekend of March, you swim deep enough to see what appears to be roads mapping the lake floor, like veins toward a beating heart. You pause, hovering above the town you’ve never visited but that has followed you, year after year. You call out into the dark blue. Bubbles explode around your face, carrying your voice into the deep.
Instead of soothing an ache, seeing the town ignites something that pushes you back to the water. You are not satisfied by the winding shadows of streets. You want, you need, to see the church where your parents had wed, the elementary school and your family’s home across the street. You need to see the lot where your parents, your sister, Erica, Erica—her name rings through your mind like a bell—had pulled in and out of every day, to touch the concrete of the front stoop and the gravel dusted around it. You know it is impossible, but as you imagine the house, you can’t help but picture your current home shrouded in algae and dark, dark, blue.
***
By the time May returns, you’ve taken to wearing long pants to hide your legs, your growing scales. You continue doing so even after the weather has become too hot to justify, and your mother glances at you in the morning and tells you to hurry up and do your laundry, don’t you have any other clothes? Though you disguise your deformity, it does not disgust you. You trace your scales when you are alone, cataloging their growth as they bud from your skin. They first array your legs in ripples—like someone has tossed a rock into water and mapped the pattern onto you—soon developing into a mosaic that glistens silver and green. You relish the feeling of their edges digging under your nails, the sting of pain it brings.
You’ve all but quit the swim team by this point, but you find that you don’t miss it as much as you expected, this activity that was a fixture in your life for almost ten years, the artificially blue water that had become a second home. You couldn’t return even if you wanted to, what with your inexplicable scales, the “sickness” that doesn’t clog your lungs but that has consumed your lower half. When your parents ask, you tell them you are focusing on your studies in preparation for college applications. “I’m going to the library again,” you say on the phone as you head to the lake after school. “There’s a big group presentation coming up, so I’ll be staying a bit late.” Even once they’ve hung up, you keep the phone tucked between your shoulder and your ear, listening to the silence on the other end.
At times, you wonder how old Erica had been. Was she seventeen, like you? Older? She could have been younger, but you struggle to picture it, a child alone in a drowning house. As you return home, you peer at your mother in the kitchen. You watch her watch you, turning her head just a few degrees to glance in your direction before returning to her cooking. You take off your shoes, and you wonder what exactly it is that she is looking for, whether, in a reversal of your own actions, she is searching for Erica’s face in yours. You do not resent Erica for this, and you are surprised to find that you do not want to. Rather, something settles within you, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a pond, returned to its rightful place. Left to erode into something smoother, more polished.
You return to the lake by yourself a few days before your parents’ trip. You shuck your clothes off by the lakeside, fold them, and nestle them beneath a tree, then slide into the water that has become so familiar to you, sinking your toes into the mud before you push off toward the center of the lake. Your legs press together into one, and your kicks grow in power, each one thrumming a name.
#
Stella Lei’s work appears in CRAFT, Four Way Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize, as well as selected for the Granum Foundation Prize and Wigleaf Top 50 longlists. Her work has also received support from the Sundress Academy for the Arts through their writers’ residency program. Her debut prose chapbook, Inheritances of Hunger, was published by River Glass Books in 2022. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.