Gianna Carruth, “Pink Dreams and Glittering Realities”
The water bubbles in front of me. It bubbles, ripples, splashes up from a perfect circle onto the surrounding ice, then calms. The spikes on my boots form little cracks as I pace around the hole. The water is inky and dark, like trying to peer into obsidian, and there’s no trace of what was just dropped into it.
“So… she’s finally gone.” I blow on my hands to warm them before stuffing them into the pockets of my coat. Briefly, I wish I’d brought her gloves to wear. I don’t have any of my own, but hers were these bright pink mittens with little cats stitched into them by her mother.
“Are you proud of yourself?” A tired voice calls from somewhere behind me. I don’t dare look up from the pool. I hear her mother pad closer and, in my peripheral vision, I can see the tips of brown flats, a staple of the local diner’s waitress uniform. A cool hand touches my cheek, urging me to look at her. It’s hard to believe I once found such a hand encouraging.
“Why wouldn’t I be.” It’s a statement, not a question, and she seems to recognize that. Without another word, I blink, and the flats are gone. Second time that’s happened. I almost want to laugh. Her mother used to tell her that she had enough potential to give the rest of their family hope for the future. She always liked hearing that.
And then, her parents got divorced. A messy feud, jumping between homes as accusations and charges were thrown around like each one didn’t make her flinch. Her older brother couldn’t take it. He ran away at sixteen and was never seen again. It took four years until she, on her twelfth birthday, finally understood he was dead.
“Are you proud of yourself?” Another voice asks, this time to my left. It sounds like rocks sliding under a creaky door. I don’t dare look up from the pool. He moves in and puts his hand on my head. His lanky fingers twitch as if they’re going to ruffle my hair, but they don’t.
“She deserved it.” I snap through gritted teeth. The water bubbles a bit as he sighs and stalks away, his old converse sliding over the ice. Her father bought them both pairs when they were younger. Her brother’s were a gift when he got on the soccer team. Hers were a bribe to testify against her mother.
He wasn’t a bad man, just desperate. He worked as a simple repairman with the experience he gained as an engineer in the military, he couldn’t afford to keep up the constant legal fighting. Of the two, he was probably the better parent. But his scars and his stubble and his stern way of handling everything made it difficult for him to prove his case. In the end, he lost custody and visiting rights completely when she was fourteen.
“You proud of yourself?” A gruff voice rumbles to my right, tinged with a dry husk only years of chainsmoking could cause. I don’t dare look up from the pool. I can smell his old cologne. It was discontinued decades ago. I don’t want to know how much he had stocked up.
“… Proud?” I don’t need to say anything else. The water splashes up with discontentment. His heavy boots thump against the ice as he walks past and disappears behind me, leaving me with just the faint traces of his smell. A splash leaps up and soaks me from my toes to my knees, but I don’t dare flinch.
She loved him at some point. Perhaps before he left for good. Perhaps before her mother turned her against him. Perhaps before her brother left a note on the dinner table with nothing but the words that haunt her still. No name, no date, no apology for doing exactly as Father had.
“Cook for her. She’s too young to use a stove.”
Maybe he thought she was also too small to reach up and pull the note down. Maybe too small to read his scratchy handwriting. Definitely too small to understand what he meant. But even after he was gone, she’d loved him too. At least until her twelfth birthday. She finally understood he was dead when a classmate’s pet had gone missing the day before her party hosted at the local park. She listened as the friend’s father explained that missing things always come back.
Two hours later, they found the dog being gnawed on by a coyote.
Nelly was its name. The dog, not the friend. It was a sweet old mutt that had been diagnosed with arthritis a year earlier. ‘It was almost her time anyways,’ or so said the nearby ranger that put down both canines. She thought about that dog often. She wondered about her own time, her mother’s time, her father’s time. What exactly did it mean?
“Woof!” A furry head noses between my knees and sits down. I can’t look up from the pool. I’m forced to see it next to the water, peering up at me. It’s just as warm as it was in life. Its tail wags slowly back and forth behind us. Its fur is tinged gray with age and its skin somewhat sunken in. I can count its ribs with a glance.
“She’s gone.” I whisper, my words stolen away by an apathetic wind. It must’ve heard them though, as its gaze falls to the water. Before I can even think, it dips its nose into the freezing abyss, and dives in.
It leaves no trace behind, not even a ripple or little scratches from its unclipped nails. I quickly circle where it went in, frantically searching for any sign of the hound. I don’t know what has gripped me so. I did not feel such desperation when any of the others left, what is so special about this dog?
Suddenly, the water writhes as if alive, taking on an almost tentacled form, like that of some incomprehensible eldritch being. It splashes up violently, soaking my boots, and pushing up on my soles to loosen the metal spikes’ hold. I fall back with a scream. The impact knocks less wind from me than the wave that reaches up and grips my ankles with cold tendrils, pulling me down into the very bore I’d narrowly failed to forget her in. I flip over and claw around desperately, but it’s no use. The chill is enough to sap my very consciousness from my body. Just as I slip into the darkness, I see four faces watching me with expressions akin to sympathy.
Yet none move to help as I take in one last gulp of air.
I come to when my lungs begin to ache. I’ve sunk too far to see where I came in. I’ve sunk too far to see anything, just an unmoving void. Only when I hold my hands to mere inches from my eyes am I able to catch even a glimpse of my own pruned skin. But then, something moves a ways past my fingers.
Pink.
Pink.
Knitted pink yarn, with knitted pink cats, and knitted pink padding, all wound up in little pink mittens. Held safely inside the mittens, were little, likely equally pink hands that reached out towards me. They did not seek me to grasp them, they only beckoned me closer.
I had no choice but to oblige.
“Are you proud of this?” She asks me when I swim close enough to see the little child-like dimples in her cheeks. I can’t place the look in her eyes, gentle as it is, but I suppose I’m glad it’s not her rightful fury.
My mouth opens slowly, the back of my tongue lowering to suck in a breath, only for my lungs to fill with a hot burning. I choke and try to cough up the inhaled water, but simply I swallow even more. The look she gives me is familiar now. Apathy. I’d seen it a hundred times in the mirror, and given it to her minutes ago.
“I asked you a question, Jean. Are you proud of this?” Her mitts grip either side of my head to hold me still. The pain, the blinding pain, subsides into a low throb. This time, I do manage to speak, though I could never explain how.
“No. No, I’m not, I want to go home, please. Why are you doing this to me again?” If one could cry underwater, I surely would. She laughs and smiles, exposing her little spiky eight-year-old teeth.
“What do you think you’ll gain from speaking to a vision, Jean? You can’t change the past, you can’t tear yourself apart and expect to see a polished interior.” She giggles once more and releases me to do a spin far too quick for our aquatic setting. “You can’t drown me and see yourself righteous when it only gets worse!”
If one could weep underwater, I surely would. “I do not think I am righteous, not when all of this was my fault.” The words tear from my throat and I flail in her direction. I’m not quite sure what I want from her, an embrace of life or death. She stops and lets her smile fall.
“Jean, would you blame me for all that has happened?” She asks, slowly taking off the mittens. They float in front of her, unmoving.
“No, no, of course not, it couldn’t have been you. You didn’t know better, but I did. I knew and I did nothing.” I lunge for the mittens. Without them, her fingers have begun to freeze. “Please, don’t do this, I never meant to hurt you. It was a mistake, please.”
I, as one, start to sob underwater. The mitts evade my wild fingers and sink just before I can touch them.
“Jean, you were a child. Hardly old enough to read a chapter book, much less understand love or abandonment or why, exactly, kind Mr. Miller shot Nelly.” She slips off her converse, revealing little hand-stitched petals. Those, too, sink into nothingness.
“I-I should’ve done something, anything.” My body relaxes into the sudden melancholy filling my head as I look into her eyes. There is something there now, something more than nothing. There is… forgiveness. And for a brief moment, I feel a taste of relief. “…Was there anything I could’ve done?”
The somber, smiling look she gives me is all I need. My chest loosens around a breath I don’t remember taking. My limbs move more freely, as if in fog rather than water. My feet, suddenly bare of shoes and in flowery socks, plant themselves firmly on an unseen surface. She matches my stance with an odd cuteness compared to her previous words.
“I’m tired.” I whisper after a far-too-long beat of silence. My face warps uncomfortably, cheeks tensing and lips thinning into an unfamiliar smile. As if driven by an unseen urge, I bend one knee and reach into my pocket, pulling out the gloves that had sunk. She skips closer and holds out her hands with her palms up. I slip each finger into its rightful hole.
“I’m sorry.”
“I love you.” Her childish arms wrap around my neck and she buries her face into the plush polyester of my coat’s shoulder. And I hold her close, closer than I think I ever have. Just as I close my eyes, I feel a freezing surface gust whip around us and my knees are planted solidly in snow on the bank of my favorite childhood lake. The last thing I see is a tag in the neck of her jacket. In thick marker on white fibers, ‘Jean’ is scrawled in shaky letters.
