In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)

May 31, 2025

“Roller System” by Camellia Paul

Drowning

By Shoshana Ray

We weren’t taught how to swim but learned through osmosis. Watch your older cousins, watch your siblings, watch the adults, and you’ll figure it out. Most of us did, except for the runt of our pack. By the time Jess arrived, moments for such tutelage by proximity were scant. Most of our parents’ lives were allocated to their addiction, with its varied machinations and deeds—boosting, hustling, copping, staving off withdrawal. But this afternoon, we went to the lake, to eat peanut butter saltine sandwiches and chase the shoreline.

Mom sunbathes several feet from us and twists the dial on her silver radio to the summer’s hit, “Need You Tonight” by INXS. Behind tortoise shell sunglasses, she sings along with a Marlboro Red in hand and swigs a Pepsi between drags. It’s a quiet day with few beach goers. Wafts of Mom’s baby oil and gardenia perfume trail me. I wade into the brown water as a bank of mush gives under my feet. Minnows dart around my calves and a green swath of trees canopy the water’s edge. Cold lake meets my thighs and crawls up my torso. The muddy shelf beneath me recedes. I have to dog paddle to stay afloat.

We play Marco Polo and my cousin Cushy is “It.” Flailing our arms to evade capture, we holler, duck, and plunge under water, our only hiding place out here. Cousin Jess waddles in our direction, wearing Strawberry Shortcake undies, while Mom is splayed out on her back, serenading the sky. Jess seems okay for a bit but loses the shelf, then bobs up and down. Her arms thrash until she slips into a ring of bubbles. We’re too far away. United as a chorus, we screech, floundering our way toward her. 

“Jess’s drowning! Help!”

Mom bolts up, sprints toward us, and dives into the lake. The arc of her body conjures a mermaid as she pierces the water. Seconds later, she arrives beyond the muddy shelf and retrieves Jess. With her arm wrapped around her torso she keeps Jess’s little lolling head above water, swimming her to land, with a swarm of kids trailing in her wake. We clamber ashore. Huffing, Mom collapses onto her towel and lays Jess on her side, crying, and sputtering out frothy rivulets. Mom hushes her, checks her breathing, and the tilt of her mouth. Then jerks around and sweeps her pointer finger at us in the semicircle we’ve formed around her.

“If Jess had died, it would be all of your fault!”

We draw closer and form a vigil around Jess, who mewls in the fetal position. We watch her small back rise and fall. Protesting with sequences of ‘buts’ to explain, Mom shuts us down with a snap of her fingers. Her brown eyes narrow in on our frazzled faces. Hunched on the towel, long arms dangle off of bent knee tops, as water falls from her hair and neck. She sighs, then peers beyond us to the horizon. Her eyes are red but not from the lake. 

“Y’all want to carry that weight around?”

We grow silent, look at her, and shake our heads. Her voice wavers with calamity because she knows what it’s like to be burdened by the dead, pressing against you as you try to live, the space it takes to bear them. My whole life, I witnessed her haunting, from blood-soaked flashbacks of her sister’s murder that buckled her knees in the middle of nothing, as she cooked or walked across a room, to her brother’s wake, when he died of an overdose, and the musty funeral home room rang with the keening of her strangled “no.” She simply had no more losing left in her. 

Tears well up in my eyes and another cousin bites her lower lip. We look down at the packed, gray sand beneath us and wiggle our toes deeper. The heaviness of it swallows my ankles, and I wonder if I’ll just keep sinking. Her gaze shifts back to us. 

“I didn’t think so.” 

Shoshana Ray (she/her) is a somatic psychotherapist and writer whose work centers on posttraumatic growth. She's published for The Keepthings and has forthcoming prose in Hippocampus and TrashLight Press. Beauty, Terror, & Everything In Between, her fortnightly letter on Substack, is the best place to connect with her. Currently, she’s editing a memoir. Shoshana lives in the Twin Cities with her husband, son, and geriatric tuxedo cat. She is an aspiring tea sommelier and analog enthusiast, with two typewriters to boot.