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1In the summer of my seventh year, I became fixated on water webbing sunlight at the bottom of a pool. 2We swam in my aunt’s backyard—my sister, my cousin, and me. 3Aunt Sue didn’t often join us. 4She stayed inside and watched shows that featured possessed mothers, women’s bodies drifting to a muddied shore, teenagers screaming for help from the bottom of a pit. 5Rhythmic almost, the same mistakes these characters made repeatedly, my aunt clicking on the lamp and muttering, I can’t believe they did that, I can’t believe they did that. 6Some years later, her liver would fail, and then her kidneys, and then her legs, too tired to take the stairs or pump in the breaststroke, and I could tell you why, but then I would be just like the pastor in his eulogy saying, fighter, warrior, a heart of gold. 7These days, I’m furious about the impasse of her life until I think of how one time—after I pushed my sister into the corner of a table—she told me she hit my dad in the head with a shovel when she was a child, blood dribbling in dark streams over his blond hair just after he’d been provoking her, and I wondered how she could make me feel so light despite my cold-blooded blunder, how I could feel like I was floating outside of the rubbery Intex in her backyard while we bonded over the horrors we had caused. 8Every question after that one drew me back to that feeling: 9How hard I could squeeze my lungs; how fervently I could kick my legs into a furor of foam. 10How—if I prodded enough—fast my aunt could swim toward me if she was a shark, and we, the mermaids, fleeing from her jaws. 11For a moment, she must have forgotten what was real and what was not. 12Gleaming placoid scales, her own lotus skin, molars-now-turned-serrated-teeth finding my exposed right ass cheek. 13Even after my crying waned, she couldn’t explain what had happened. 14A bruise enjambed down the back of my thigh, contorted, magenta incisor marks that she asked to see days later in the blue blush of the TV, and we couldn’t stop laughing because all accidents are funny, depending on how you look at them.
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Casey Reiland’s work has appeared in Autofocus, HAD, trampset, On the Seawall, and elsewhere, and she holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Wyoming. She resides in Somerville, MA, and you can find more of her work at her website or her latest musings at @caseyreiland.bsky.social.