Dead Bodies of Water

Flash Contest Finalist

“Broken” by Carolyn Adams

Dead bodies of water lay round our once island. Swarm clouds reflect in stagnant pools connected by rotting promenades and piers, like unsure skeeto legs piercing straits between the mudflats and mud-cracks of long-lost lands. And you say you’ll chance the gangways, so light of foot you are, my child of the sun-swept skies, some way protected by your second-skin, with your skeeto-net aloft to hunt for females the size of the once dragonflies, while I wear my muddies to make my way across the open bay. 

Mama, we're lucky we're not polar bears, you say, and you repeat once more what you heard on a late night radio show about the history of our world. The great eclipse, you say, when winter didn’t come and melt-water pools of permafrost spawned enough skeetos to kill the caribou. When the arctic ice melted into sea. When islands shrunk, their disappearing outlines marked on our map like contour rings. And you tell the skeetos flying around your head about the island where the polar bears eat their young, because they’ve run out of walrus, as if the buffet’s not been replenished. Words I had to explain to you and for you made the past a cornucopia dream, one you try to capture at night, like a firefly trying to catch the light. 

In the cabin, the succulent spreads its limbs across the floor, radiating like a starfish, the compass of our wooden world that wavers on creaking legs. And there’s that oniony smell as you press the plant leaf, draw out aloe vera and tap the bite sites, where a skeeto has pierced your second-skin. And you complain, when I lift the lid to stir, that you hear buzzing from the pot even though the skeetos are all dead. Deader than winter dead, I tell you. 

And when I turn to listen to my own dead Mama say to me, skeetos are not filling but give the soup a crunch like croutons used to do, you ask me what’s she saying this time? And I lie, as I always do, and say how proud your grandmother is of you. And you ask why she doesn't speak to you like she does to me. 

And I say maybe she does, maybe the skeetos are her voice, and when you nod, I don't expect you to go to sleep without your second-skin, or for you to wake to a constellation of skeeto bites, which wheal and flare like fireworks, or for each to go out but one, one that keeps you burning, that catches you in its gravitational pull, an infectious black hole my Mama says you cannot escape from, however light you are. 

But while the fever rages, I tell her, hope shines bright. Perhaps a maluskeeto’s bite might be countered by a benignus, and balance might once more be restored, so you may once more dance lightly along the gangways, while I trudge the mud and make my way, following your silhouette across a moonlit bay.

about the author

Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish community worker, teacher and writer in London, with work selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 2023, Best Small Fictions 2024, and Best of the Net 2024 and is currently exploring the power of stories to promote social change.

about the artist

Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have been published in the pages, and on the covers of Defunkt Magazine, Steam Ticket, Change Seven Magazine, The Fictional Cafe, and Red Weather, among others. She has authored five chapbooks, with one being a collection of her collage art, entitled What Do You See?