PISCINE
Essay. Joint winner of the 2025 KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize.
In my earliest dream, I am swimming. I call it a dream. This is largely because the phrase I remember what it felt like to be in the womb is an impossible one. Hence, a dream.
I am floating. There is a voice above me, muffled, the way music sounds when you’re underwater.
It is dark.
I am very small.
The voice is very close.
There are three things of which I am certain. One is that the voice is my mother’s. The second is that she is upset. The third is that this proximity to her pain is unbearable.
Perhaps there is also a fourth thing: the water is not safe.
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For the longest time, we thought she was just drunk. Evening phone calls that circled back on themselves, messages that descended into confusion. Her voice had lost its robustness. Her words trembled a little, as though she was on the brink of a hiccup, the pressure all wrong.
It is hard to distinguish between cause and effect. A few years before, she had fallen from the attic ladder and shattered her heel. Maybe the fall spurred the unravelling. Maybe she was already out to sea.
She sat on the sofa for months, barred from walking by doctors. Initially, friends asked what groceries she needed. Generosity wore thin. On the phone, she described one who had eventually refused to bring her anything more.
‘I’m not a fucking slave,’ the woman had said.
My mother sounded surprised. ‘I only asked for another few bottles of wine.’
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There are many strange truths in this world. It is extraordinary, for example, to think that we were all once fish.
It was the evolution of eyes, not limbs, that began our passage on to land. In water, a fish can see about the length of its own body. It is a myopic world. In the air that range of vision increases drastically, and so fish began to change. Their eyes expanded and slid, with millennial slowness, to the tops of their heads. Fins thickened. Insects wallowing in the shallows became victims of sudden scaly lunges. At some point, the lunges got bigger. More powerful. Eventually, a fish stood up and walked.
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Full piece online at Kill Your Darlings.