2025 Pushcart Nominated Story from Stanchion Magazine Issue 16
‘was was all there was and was was what we were’ (Diane Seuss)
August was never a champion swimmer. Just a ‘water baby’, like all kids who grew up within easy reach of the ocean and with parents who entrusted them unquestioningly to its care. A poet August loves writes: ‘even with the surface roiling, the depths are calmly nursing away at love’. Once, this seemed true of the sea.
August forgot about swimming when she moved to London – the water there was colder, and harder to access. Not being from a freshwater place, inland swimming felt unnatural to her - wrong, somehow, too still. Besides, her adult body felt newly awkward in a bathing suit where once such a garment had been a second skin. She stopped thinking about it. She took up running instead, moving past bodies of water on foot, at pace, in lycra, in all weathers – the winding Bow Back Rivers with their intriguingly capricious ebbs and flows and tributaries; the Thames, of course, stately, murky, broad and mottled like a turbot; the teal expanse of the Hackney Reservoir, ringed by tower blocks and stubby trees; Limehouse Basin, boat-lined gateway to the oldest canal in London, filled with pennywort; the Lee Valley Reservoir Chain, with its invisible depths incongruously hidden by green sloping banks populated by sheep and geese; the Hackney Marshes river, also known as the Hackney Riviera, filled with laughing, shrieking bodies cooling off in dumped sewage all summer long.
August observed the many birds and other creatures on and in and around these bodies of water – slick cormorants drying their wings, black-headed gulls and diving terns, bronze bream, slippery newts, pipistrelle bats, cobalt spark of kingfisher, grey, motionless herons stalking fish, coots by turn aggressive and full of play, little moorhens flashing red in the rushes, swifts returning from migration, carrion crows calling loud across the marshes, brown rats moving at pace across a thoroughfare, swans and their cygnets, adorably, improbably large, like dinosaurs, and, once, a thick, black eel whose body she found lying on the Greenway in the hot sun, evidently dropped by an errant gull or heron. But August never entered the water, not bodily, though her mind would sometimes slip below its bright brown or green surfaces, past floating coot nests and abandoned picnic coolers, to imagine resting her eyes for a moment in the chill watery dark.
*
Some five thousand miles away, August’s sister Daryl, another water baby, worked as a scuba diving instructor. One late morning, surfacing from a drift dive of fifty-two minutes, Daryl and her four clients found themselves alone on the water, out of sight of land. Their boat, the Super Kim, and her three crew, had vanished. The surface of the sea was empty. At first, Daryl wouldn’t have been worried – the current was strong and they had drifted intentionally, after all; the boat was deliberately unanchored and should have been following their bubbles. She understood the ocean as an entity to be navigated and understood, not mastered, not feared. For Daryl, diving was a poetic endeavour: exquisite in its creativity but also in its control. The five divers would have bobbed on the surface in a loose group and simply waited, BCDs inflated, masks around their necks, breathing apparatus face down in the water to prevent it freely flowing. Spitting phlegm from air-dry mouths into the water, they would have chatted about the creatures and the coral they had seen during the dive, Daryl’s lime green surface marker buoy floating rigid and upright beside them, marking their spot. Dogtooth tuna, whitetip reef shark, bigeye trevally, barracuda; curtains of tiny glassfish, white and electric purple nudibranchs with their almost imperceptible ripples, a gnarled, covert scorpionfish, an old hawksbill sea turtle lazing atop a cleaning station, attended agreeably by damselfish, angelfish, wrasse. No mantas today. No cuttlefish, Daryl’s favourite. No octopus. No peacock mantis shrimp with their bullet-fast punches. Daryl herself would probably have remained quiet as the group waited, scanning the horizon for the boat. Relaxed – the creatures in that far-flung sea have no designs on people.
Time would have passed – twenty minutes; thirty. ‘Stay together’, Daryl would have cautioned her clients, noticing that the elderly couple in the group, two cartoonish Dutchmen who consistently treated each other with the gentle remoteness of long-time love, had floated slightly apart from the others, a garrulous British wildlife photographer and a tattooed and beautiful French engineer. ‘The boat will find us’, Daryl would have reassured them – ‘don’t worry’. The current was strong that day, but without sight of land or buoy or boat, it would have been difficult for the group to tell how strong. The soon-to-be noonday sun would have felt hot; the group had no water, no sunscreen, no hats or sunglasses, these not being things they would have needed thirty metres deep in the sea. An hour, two. On Daryl’s instruction, the group would have eventually dropped their weights; tens of kilograms of lead ballast interwoven along webbed belts would have hurtled out of sight into the deep, trailing aluminium buckles, thudding dully onto the seafloor after a swirling descent. Thirst would have begun to set in. Sunburn. Some nausea, as the horizon appears to move more recklessly, and hard-to-control thoughts arrive. ‘They’ll never find us’. ‘No one’s coming’. ‘How long have we been here?’ The temptation to descend beneath the surface of the water, to escape the sun, the motion of the waves, even for just a few minutes, would have been moot – post-dive, everyone apart from Daryl is too low on air, and now their weights are gone. ‘Keep your BCDs inflated’. ‘Use the mouthpiece’. ‘Stay together’.
There is nowhere to swim to, but ankles, calves, and hamstrings begin to cramp. The skin on faces and scalps must have blistered. Backs and heads ached. Mouths dried up – though they would have attempted to drink the seawater. Bodies must have grown cold and begun to shiver uncontrollably, despite the sun, despite their wetsuits. ‘D-don’t p-panic – th-th-they’re looking for us’. Fatigue makes way for exhaustion. Disquiet for anxiety, and then, yes, some panic, in the afternoon, as the wind gathers and the surface of the sea grows first choppy, and then wild. Five-foot waves eventually pick the group apart. ‘Keep your regulators in!’ Daryl would have called, as the current dragged the five further out into the blue. ‘They’re looking for us!’.
Darkness would have fallen. Then perhaps heavy rain, a sort of double-edged respite. The wind drops, then picks up again; the surface of the water roils. The group has splintered, all are apart but the couple, who cling desperately together. The wind drops, the sea flattens. The couple fall asleep, drift apart. Hours pass. Then days. Daryl’s lime green surface marker begins to perish. Dehydration. Delirium. Facial burns. Beneath them, fusilier fish move like birds, in murmurations, a silent symphony. Bigeye trevallies form tornados – eddying towers of intense courtship, a tactic, a performance. Animals call to each other across nautical miles. Bioluminescence lights the water, otherworldly – no, our-worldly – organisms creating their own light. Above – frigatebirds; pelicans. Mostly still dressed in their absurd armour, the five are lost at sea.
Later, the crew of the Super Kim said that the group simply failed to surface. That the group of divers, not the crew of the boat, were the ones to disappear.
*
Though close, August was used to not hearing from Daryl. Signal was bad, wifi was bad, both siblings were having too much fun or working too hard. They thought of each other often – every day, several times – but theirs was a family of long-established long-distance relationships, of other countries, airmail letters and the occasional crackly phone-line, missed weddings and funerals and unfamiliar cousins. So August picked up immediately when she saw that the number calling her phone was from five thousand miles away – a distress call, made on behalf of the disappeared. She panicked at first – totally lost it – but the caller was able to calm her. This was not a case of bodies filled with oceanwater, washed up on beaches after months at sea. They weren’t actually dead, after all, just lost. Just three days now. Lost things get found. Daryl was a proficient navigator and experienced instructor; the group were reasonably experienced and had all their gear on; and they were being looked for, hard, both aerially and on the water. Diving, of course – the caller reminded August – was fundamentally about controlling panic: ‘so let’s let them do what they have been trained to do, and let us do it too’. ‘So I shouldn’t panic?’ There was no need to catch a flight halfway around the world to join the search operation. What could August do, anyway? Things were in hand. This call was just for information, a courtesy. ‘We’ll find them; they’ll be ok’, the voice reassured her.
Lost divers were almost always found, August thought. Were they? Boats were always miscounting, leaving divers behind. Easy mistake. Find them. She thought of the twelve Thai boys in the Tham Luang cave – not divers, but rescued by them, though one of the divers died, running out of air on his way out of the cave. She thought of the Lonergans, lost off the coast of Queensland. Of the Blue Hole at Dahab in northern Egypt, cathedral and cemetery. Of the disorienting passageways and daytime darkness of Cenote Esqueleto off the coast of Mexico. Of the boy spear-fisher who, at depth, took a breath of air offered by a well-meaning scuba diver, his lungs over-expanding to the point of rupture as he ascended to the surface, dying on his boat with blurred vision and blood on his lips.
As she hung up the phone August thought of Sylvia Earle saying ‘everything we care about is anchored in the ocean’. That night, as August lay in bed, thinking of her sister, she remembered the opening stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, ‘One Art’:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Then she thought of the closing stanza, what Bishop called the ‘tearjerker’:
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Was Daryl lost? She had certainly seemed intent on being, or getting, lost, often enough. But they both had. Or, at least, their absences had always been reconfigured as losses. As kids, they would run away together, taking the dogs with them and hiding out in secret places – the dense, overhanging foliage that grew wildly on the slope leading up to their landlady’s house; the neighbourhood house that was half-built and then abandoned, unfinished, to the richly generative coastal elements; the old hotel, with its still-shiny parquet floor and empty swimming pool, a blue flaking sinkhole puddled with dead leaves. Eventually, the dogs would get bored or hungry and head home alone; the kids themselves might be discovered or return themselves at dusk or after dark, lost but now apparently found again, prodigal, punished only half-heartedly in the rich reward of parental relief. As teenagers and young adults, they were noted among their friends for their Irish goodbyes, disappearing from parties or nights out, with ‘no valedictions, out the door like smoke from extinguished candelabras’, as poet Diane Seuss had written about her own lost self. As adults, one of them was now ‘lost in London’, sometimes, even, ‘lost to London’, as if August’s life there was somehow involuntary, irrevocable; the other (said with a smiling, half-sad, half-admiring shake of the head) ‘just liked to get lost – got the travel bug’. Entrapped, then, and infected, from the outside; from the inside, both exactly where they wanted to be. Not lost. Until now.
Sleepless, the light from her apartment complex’s swimming pool shining underneath a rucked-up blind (lights left on after closing, again), August considered the phrase ‘lost at sea’. Was that where her sister was? At – rather than in – the sea? They may not have talked very often, but August always knew where Daryl was: asleep (or not) in her house (a tiny blue bungalow on top of a small hill, no sight of the sea but not far from it, just down a slope, across a creek, and there); in the dive shop (a squat two-room white building with a bathroom and a veranda, covered in oceanic murals, on the town’s main road, overhung by a huge golden orb spider and her web and overseen by a one-eyed white cat called Spliffy); in the boat traversing the marine national park, eating her lunch on one of the multitude of small islands that punctuated the water; or under the sea. Occasionally having a beer with friends, or riding the bony local horses on the beach with her boyfriend, but mostly the long hours, hard physical labour, and early starts meant she was in bed by nine. August could pinpoint her on a map, could even Google Earth her small town.
And now? Where in the sea was she? Was she untethered, drifting? Or had she, they, the lost group, moored up, found land, an island, a beach? August thought about the phrase ‘their loss’. Was this – would this become – a disaster? She thought about the calm voice of the caller on the phone; about Daryl’s, yes, joking voice, and how this would probably just end up being another one of her stories, something from her oceanic book of myths, like the time she and her clients were attacked in the water off a sandbar by mutant bees, or the time a nurse shark took a nip at her fingers and then wouldn’t let go. August thought of the sea, of the many nonhuman creatures who have always lived there, seen and unseen. She thought of poetry, again – of Frank O’Hara lying in the sand on Fire Island not long before the summer dawn, injured and drunk and soon to die. Of Diane Seuss, writing ‘Press a foot into this beach and blood / will ooze up instead of saltwater’.
August thought: I want to swim.
*
In the days, then weeks, that follow, there is, simply, no news. A headache settles in, grey and ill-omened, like the threat of a squall, held. Around August’s chest a similar ache materialises, feels literal, material, as if someone – something – has taken hold of her too tightly. Suddenly nauseous around food, she picks at meals and often finds herself throwing up afterwards, not always involuntarily. Her body grows bony, takes on a new shape, sharp parts stealthily protruding in unexpected places – the tops of her shoulders, her wrists. It’s unexpectedly gratifying, as well as distracting. Kilograms drop away – and go where? August wonders. Her collarbones emerge, her hips begin to jut; all up her back pale knots of bone transpire. Her skin grows thin too, and translucent, like rice paper, and endless sun damage from her childhood and teenage years is suddenly apparent in the lines that lace her hands and eyes, the veined pallor under her eye sockets.
As her body shrinks, August’s desire for water begins to grow. At first it’s just long drinks – pints and pints of cold tapwater in lieu of food – and longer and longer showers, eyes closed, the heavy, hot drench eventually turning cold. Wanting water in this way feels amorphous, abstract, metaphorical. A friend asks her how she’s feeling, and August replies: ‘I feel like I want to be in the sea’. That’s understandable, the friend indicates. It would be, the friend suggests, a way to be near her. Or, not near, but connected, somehow, in a way. The sea, after all, is all connected. It’s all the same. Is it? August realises that her friend has begun thinking of Daryl as dead, where she has not. Is she dead? When was her last liveable day, hour, moment? What lies on the other side of horror? What was her dying like? Was it hard? Did her body fill with ocean water? Is she dead? Was she alone? Wouldn’t August have felt it, known it, somehow? Daryl might have been found, just now, just moments ago, by someone who hasn’t yet found a way to make contact; a foundling, she could still be alive somewhere.
‘You should go swimming’, her friend suggests; ‘even if it’s not in the sea, it might make you … connect’.
*
August goes home and digs out a swimsuit, a black piece of Lycra suggestive of goggles and a swim hat and serious swimming in lanes. She thinks of Daryl’s multicoloured mountain of bikinis. The apartment complex’s pool is in a redbrick one-story pavilion opposite August’s windows, sitting slightly below ground level. Its tall window frames are painted blue and are partially obscured by nondescript foliage. Often the windows themselves simply appear black, but August can sometimes make out the water behind them – when the sun shines on it, or when it moves, when people move it, move through it.
It’s her first immersion in a long time. Standing in the chilly changing room in her swimsuit, August contemplates her pale shape in the mirror above the sinks, turning her rounded shoulders inward by turn in order to catch a glimpse of the tattoo between them, so rarely seen, and of the scar halfway down her right side, a fat, white track rutted on the periphery with small pockmarks where the surgeon’s curved needle had pulled stitches through her flesh as the anesthesia wore off. August remembers no pain, just the tugging. She plaits her hair – one long fishtail plait that hangs down over her left shoulder. There’s not enough silver in her hair to call it streaked, not yet, but there’s some. She thinks of a friend whose mother used to swim all year round at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath, cracking the winter ice before diving in. One January her plunge stopped her heart temporarily, and her friend swears she can date her grey hairs to the morning she got the call from Kenwood.
The pool is small – just a metre deep, and fifteen metres long. There is no deep end. An instruction printed emphatically on the walls: NO DIVING. The pool’s walls are blue mosaic, thousands of tiny tiles that gesture to an earlier era – of affluence and spare time, the luxury of commitment to a time-consuming and labour-intensive project designed to gaudily withstand the passage of time. On cloudless days sunlight filters in through the shrubs and small trees that grow around the windows, permeating the water in bright columns; on sunless days the water feels dark, though clear.
August is alone, but the pool area is full of reflections. A set of wet footprints marks the slick surfaces around the pool. As she walks along the length of the pool, from the changing room to where the pool cover is encoiled around a great metal pole, past the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, reflections walk with her: the pavilion seems populated with slippery forms, always just out of sight, performing a kind of secret calisthenics, like a wet Cubist canvas. The surface of the water seems thick. August remembers, as a child, her mother showing her and Daryl how water has a skin, slipping a needle off a fork to rest, miraculously, on its surface. August drops through it, with a slight gasp, adjusts her goggles, and pushes off with her feet.
Water rushes into her ears; the quiet of submersion is viscous and heavy, loud. There is a pleasurable darkness to it, to the nullification of noise, or noises. Her vision seems to stretch and double, to become somehow slow. A light embedded in the wall at the far end of the pool splits into two lights, and August makes for the middle point between them, only for them to melt back into one as they grow nearer. Turning her face downwards as she swims, she sees the tiny floor tiles pass by; looking ahead as she rises for air, the blue of the water grows opaque in the small distance to the end of the pool. August swims, gently at first, then harder, as she enters her body, thrusting her arms forward, around, and back through the water, her fingertips kissing, her legs awakening to a different kind of power than that which pavements and trails had given them. Back muscles awaken; core muscles awaken; lungs awaken, seizing and releasing air with a hypnotic regularity, a sibilant intake followed by a storm of underwater bubbles. The end of each length brings a flip turn and the thrust of a new departure through still-rising spume. Thought goes to sleep.
There is a boredom to it that August relishes. She swims and swims, back and forth, but can’t forget the large clock on the far wall, marking out the minutes as she moves through the water. When running, her mind wanders with a generative freedom, or is provoked to contemplation again and again by the nonhuman world through which she passes. But in the water, August finds she can’t think about anything but the water: how it moves around her, how she can’t stop moving through it, and is … not weightless, but somehow unmoored from her own diminishing weight, untethered from gravity.
*
And so begins – not a year of magical thinking, though there is that too – but a year, and then more, of immersion in water. The sea at Brighton seems to relish its power, like an athlete at the height of their powers, like a young dark cat, like the large brown gulls who soar on the wind above the pier. The water is eye-green and strong, swiftly deep, and cold, of course, and clear, and the millions of large and small pebbles that comprise the long sloping beach roil noisily under its dolorous and vital surf. Around the groins, two swimmers warn her, there have been drownings. Large red banners adorn the beach warning of high winds and danger. August finds it difficult to leave the water – the profound, seductive suck, the shifting earth under her, the rise and plunge of the tide, her sense that her sister is, somewhere, in this moving water too, that all seas are indeed connected. The sky is a bright, impossible, Nilgiri blue.
The water at the docks is often dark (dark green, dark brown, even black, gleaming and undulating like obsidian in the sunlight). The visibility is next to nothing: even when the sun shines directly onto the water at the height of summer August can barely make out the ends of her fingertips in the murk, and below her there is nothing but metres of dizzying dark. Vertigo. Bubbles lightly silver the underside of the surface, but buoy lines disappear into the abyss; fellow swimmers can slip by unseen. From time to time small, frenetic waves mark the docks’ otherwise glazed surface, and light currents render it somehow sentient. Sometimes when the wind picks up the surface is transformed into crushed silk, small, delightful crinkles everywhere; sometimes the water is like glass, sometimes it’s hostile, variable, darkly spirited, punctuated by unexpected thermoclines. Sometimes something touches August underwater – riverweed’s trailing fingers brush her feet, the back of her neck. A teasing grasp of the ankles. Great black iron cranes line the north and south water banks – relics of industry. Planes roar right overhead as they slant down into the nearby airport; a cable car cranks its quiet, airborne furrow to and fro across the river; nearby wakeboarders soar and crash. Four young swans meanwhile slip back and forth across the swimmers’ paths. Coots shout, ducks sleep on a fat floating pipe, great crested grebes nest on an obscure concrete block several hundred metres out. Once, in the spring, August sees the small lifeless body of a dead day-old duckling floating near the pontoon, unseen, it seems, by anyone else.
Near the pontoon, in the water, is a curious statue on a wonky pontoon of its own, anchored by two chains: a life-size little iron boy with the head of a bird. He appears to gaze about, seems menacingly itinerant yet somehow rooted always in place. A watcher; someone lost. The cold water, in those early winter months, is wildly painful – each immersion a kind of multiple stabbing around the throat and shoulders and chest, a dark ache at the nape of August’s neck.
The water in the Ladies’ Pond is glassy, and also dark, and ringed by trees and rushes, and beyond those by meadows. In winter it too brings a glancing pain – an intensity, shooting sensations in August’s hands and collarbones. But, also, deep, steady breathing, and an enveloping, anesthetizing embrace, the grey of the winter sky above when she turns on her back, the blackness of the bare trees, the livingness of the bodies of the people and waterbirds dotted about in the water around her. On the pontoon, in the rudimentary wooden changing area, naked women sometimes converse with one another as they shower or wait to shower or get dressed, sipping tea from flasks and shivering.
Her wardrobe is full of her sister’s clothes and jewellery, cast-offs that August’s inherited over the years as well as things Daryl’s limited luggage allowance couldn’t accommodate. August wears them more and more often, dressing in her sister’s clothes, wearing her shoes, her sports bra, necklaces that August had given her. She becomes aware of a kind of ghostliness, an absent presence or present absence; of an unpeeling, a revelation of something or someone hitherto quieted or not quite there, yet there all along. She comes across a line in a poem by Rita Dove and recognises what it evokes – that there is something inside of her, trying to get out: ‘the pok-pok-pok / of a fingernail tapping a thick cream lampshade’. She begins to see her sister, bodily, if not quite embodied – not all the time, but here and there, improbably sitting on the ground, back against the seawall, or walking past her, head down, at pace, a London walker, on a Tube platform, or, once, in the mirror, in the middle of the night, when she got up to drink more water, just standing there.
Swimming, August is sometimes conscious of somebody swimming beside her – the splash of an arm raised in crawl, the kick of two bare feet, a drawn breath. On turning, there’s nobody there.
*
On the anniversary of Daryl’s disappearance, August takes three flights of diminishing duration 5000 miles to the west and south, until she reaches an island. In a diminutive ferry, she crosses the water to a smaller island, arriving soaked to the bone from the swell that poured over the bow of the boat. She crosses the island on foot, at dusk, bare feet in brutal encounter with sharp rocks disguised in the susurrous understory, as giant land crabs scuttle drily over and among fallen coconuts. A night in a pretty cabana and she is out on the sea again, clad this time in the curious armour of the aquanaut.
August has no gills, but on sinking backwards into the ocean the water itself seems to disappear, to be transformed into a kind of thick blue light. It’s hard to imagine that what surrounds her is wet, heavy, capable of waves and spray, constantly in motion, a marker of horizon; that just a little further down it amounts to a sustained force of unsurvivable pressure. The descent, along an ancient wall of rock, teeming with creatures (the ocean is not empty), feels viscid – a slowness of movement, of vision. August is reminded of being little enough to be picked up by the adults around her. Things sound different in the undersea, muffled but also expanded, taking more time in the hearing. Hand gestures confirm connection and comfort. August remembers that divers don’t have to understand each other’s languages in order to understand each other, that there is no language underwater. Communication takes the form of an enforced no-language, of enacted quiet, of breaths, bubbles, and signals made with gestures.
There are four divers – no, five. It’s hard to make out people’s faces underwater through masks and streams of bubbles. Anyone could be anyone. Hard to keep track without constantly spinning about, snapping the neck, inducing a form of lateral vertigo.
Another night in the cabana, chickens roosting under the floorboards, dogs howling at night, rats scuttling across the rattan ceiling, and August is back in the water. Something has taken shape. Today, she free-dives, relinquishing the cumbersome gear that allows her to breathe underwater in favour of held breath and the elegant streak of a pair of elongated black fins. The group of regular divers descends first. August gulps air the way Daryl taught her, then pierces the skin of the water, plunging swift and headlong. She fins powerfully through the divers’ streaming bubbles, slick and slow as a shark. One of them seems to wave, to gesture to their air supply, beckoning to August, whose lungs are beginning tighten, to crave air where none – bar the diver’s – is to be found. August smiles. Blinks. Takes the breath.
Dr Rona Cran BA, MA, PhD is an Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of North America at the University of Birmingham.
Read more 2025 Pushcart Prize-nominated stories, including Black Balloon by Abigail E. Myers, Come Wednesday by David Lanvert, Buried by Lindsay N Marshall, and Scattered Ghosts by Abigail Kemske.
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