Of the Swamp

OF THE SWAMP

by Cadence Mandybura

Edited by Natasha Ramoutar, with assistant editor Azure Arther

Content note: This story depicts a difficult parental relationship.

Ellara could never be certain about her father. Mostly, she found him easier than her mother because he talked less and had no sharp edges. Her mother had rules, commands, and opinions, whereas her father would just lapse into silty silence whenever conflict arose. That was the scariest thing, that he was usually so soft; Ellara would begin to trust it, his gentleness, his edgelessness, forgetting that his mood could suddenly shift as though plunged into cold water.

Like this, look: she’s running to him with a fistful of yellow sunweeds she’s yanked from behind the kitchen. It’s a messy bouquet, the eye-watering colour of the flowerheads its only redeeming feature. The saw-toothed leaves drape long and limp around Ellara’s wrist. Because she pulled the plants with a five-year-old’s abandon, the roots hang like clumps of hair, clotted here and there with mud. 

Here: see her father smiling, his dimples drawing furrows in his unshaven bristles. His face grows folds as he looks down at Ellara, still so young that the stairs up to the royal study are giant to her, requiring huge, high-kneed steps. Ellara doesn’t remember this now, but then, as a little girl, she didn’t mind her father’s slovenly beard, the double chin, the lines forking from his eyes. When she is five, none of these features are ugly to her. He is her father; he is safe; she loves him. 

And she has brought him flowers. 

He doesn’t kneel or crouch—that would be unseemly, and his wife has trained him out of lowering himself—but he leans down, bringing his head closer to Ellara. There are other adults behind him, the ones with ink-stained fingers who cluster around the planning tables like hungry fish. But see how the king turns away from them instantly, brightening, because his daughter is holding out a clutch of common weeds just for him. 

The king brushes the flowers (“Thank you, my little firefly!”), cups Ellara’s cheek —and this is when he changes. He pulls away as though he has touched something disgusting, totters backward, rising again to his full height. 

“You’re cold,” he says, a thick accusation in his eyes. His face has lost the folds. The smile is gone. Instead, his skin is stiff with anger. “And damp.”

She lifts her own hand to her cheek, and yes, she supposes it’s a little wet, like always. Froggy-skin, people call it, although she never hears them directly. That term (and others, crueller) has already seeped into her world. 

She’s too young to understand why her father has changed, or what’s hidden in his words. All she knows is how she feels when he talks to her like this, when he pulls away, when his lip curls and his nostrils flare: it’s like staring into the lightning-eel pools (“Careful, Ellara”—her mother’s voice sharp, her grip abrupt—“stay back from the edge!”), the distant watery echoes laced with danger. 

The king is big and strange above her. Ellara is getting scared, so she points at the flowers, the yellow that had seemed so pretty just a few minutes ago but now also looks angry, too much itself—obnoxiously yellow, yellow without permission, yellow without polish—and the stems (which never looked ugly to Ellara, just like daddy’s face folds and spirit breath and scrubby cheeks were never ugly to her), those poor scraggly stems are starting to twist in her hand, so she just points, and takes a step back, and says:

“I brought you flowers.”

Now she can’t look at his face anymore, she sees only the sunweeds, although she feels her father’s wrath breathing like an open fire. The bouquet begins to quiver. It might be funny, some other time—a jelly, jiggling movement—but she has that lightning-eel feeling and knows this is something bad, very, very, bad, but she doesn’t think she should run and she doesn’t want to stay so she just stands there with her arm hand fist outstretched, the flowers a yellow-petalled shield in the study’s gloom—

“Your Majesty?” one of the inkstains says, doubtful, standing. Ellara barely sees him, just a watery shape behind the trunk of her father. 

Her palm burns as he rips the plants from her grasp and flings them at her. Yellow, yellow, yellow stings her face. 

“Get out,” he says. “Go play in a slough somewhere.”

(And maybe, very probably, the king feels bad after his outburst, and doesn’t know where his anger came from, because later that night he hugs Ellara and apologizes, apologizes, apologizes. He stays up late playing wings and beaks with her until she cracks a smile, and the twinge he feels that it’s a wide-lipped froggy smile is buried under the relief that this time, maybe, she forgives him. She tells him about her swim and he’s careful not to puncture her joy with his own pain: the sodden fear from when he had been a frog, the dampness, the cold, the shrinking of his mind, the short and indifferent path to death. His last flickers of human thought were leaving him just as Ellara’s mother saved him, pressed her mouth to his poisonous skin, an act of defiance, not love, just bravado for a stupid teenage dare. Defiance, he admits, is perhaps what’s needed to survive in the swamp, but, kissing Ellara’s clammy cheek good night, he prefers love.)

But look: the flowers are crumpled and curling on the study floor, and Ellara doesn’t know that her father is sorry, that he already regrets letting his fear behave so monstrously to his daughter. See: she runs, stumbling down the giant stairs, sobbing all the way out to the mudline then into the water, just like her father said, walks right in with her shoes and all, because she likes how the water hugs her and never shouts at her, even if it does buzz and mumble and slither with all sorts of life. She goes deeper than she’s gone before, the swamp soothing her blistered feelings, until she finds a spot less tangled with water weeds and ducks her head below the surface.

This is the day that Ellara discovers that she can breathe underwater. 

In the water, everything goes still. The aboveground world is spiky for Ellara, who never knows when she will tread on the nettles of her mother’s rules or into the squeezing silence of a halted conversation. Underwater, even light slows down. Colours of the air world—yellowed leaves, pink lotus petals, the embroidered blue of her sleeves—all wash into a calming murk. She discovers that her lungs can rest. She touches the water; the water touches her. It is like becoming invisible, in the best possible way. 

Now, many years later, she retreats to water whenever she is hurt, splashing through the reeds until she finds a patch deep enough to cradle her whole body. Look: she dips her head below the water, splays her limbs, and suspends herself. And she listens. Water is full of sound. At first, it is a disorienting wash of echoes, pops, groans, bubbles, ripples. But with practice, she learns to hear the shapes in the blur. 

She also learns to listen inward, to the cooling throb of her heart, letting herself become another creature of the swamp.