I was sure there was a ladder when I jumped in, she thought, as she started comparing the tiled walls towering above her to flat shiny Everests. She’s been slowly realising what a dangerous pastime “swimming” really is; submerging oneself in a foreign and unsurvivable landscape not suited to her silly oxygen-hungry lungs. If she had managed to climb out after a few minutes, this thought would have been quickly forgotten and she’d be cannon-balling back in the pool tomorrow for her daily laps, but she’s been treading water for 3 hours now. She notices a beetle on its back careening past her on a wave from her thrashing body, and sees that her and that turtling little pest are in the same, unfortunately metaphorical, boat.
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Like everyone else, she and her wife moved here when the city was hit by a monster attack that triggered the worst nuclear disaster since the tornado blitz the week before. Though many were understandably left feeling displaced, they instead shared a wide-eyed excitement about the possibilities of their new future and couldn’t help feeling giddy in their move to this strange town.
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The early days in their run-down but cosy bungalow were spent endlessly dancing to samba records and jumping merrily on the sofa. The bottom-of-the-range oven relentlessly burnt their toaster pastries, but they would just laugh and sigh at the paltriness of their non-existent problems.
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They made friends with the neighbours and the maid and the boy who delivers the newspapers, and got slacker jobs to pay their meagre bills. The fruits of motherlode never reached this dusty place but they felt truly happy in its simplicity.
It was when the sofa caught fire and the record player got stolen by a mime in the night that their warm feelings of belonging began to whittle. Each night would bring fresh fears of another creeping scoundrel, each toaster pastry fears of wretched flames. The phantom ring of sirens and the sleep deprivation that came with it coaxed the pang of blame into their minds, and so the first cracks shot between them.
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As she sculls, her body grows weak and her legs start to feel like anchors dropped at the deep end pulling her down. She’s so hungry she can picture the enormous bowl of cereal she made for her and her wife this morning, droplets of condensation running down the side of the ceramic as it remains untouched on the kitchen counter. Panic overloads her mind with thoughts of a shower, a bed, a conversation, the cereal again; flicking past each dangerously-low basic need like a spinning merry-go-round, kind of like the spin when you change from outfit to outfit, she thought momentarily before returning to the rolodex.
As the morning alarm clock shrilled them awake ever-earlier each morning, the repetition bore a deeper tread in their now cyclical and uneventful days, and as their growing resentments had found a home amongst their worn-out furniture, their young vibrant selves shrank into two small pixelated specs in their memories.
Instead of their meaty late-night conversations about love and life, her wife would spend hour after hour talking to herself in the mirror. If only they could find themselves in each other the way they used to. Her wife’s signature wolf whistle, goose, woohoo treatment seemed like a lifetime ago.
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It was when their albeit rather neglected tween got taken by the social services lady that these relatively common cracks ripped into an irreparable tectonic fault line between them. The violent crevasse of grief tore itself through the bungalow like a bolt of lightning, and she felt the happiness they once shared base jump down into the abyss, never to return. She could see in her wife’s eyes when they lay upon her the pain that their shared memories conjured, and sometimes she swore to herself that she could see a broken engagement ring rigorously spinning above her own head.
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And yet, as if flipping a switch, the sound of her wife’s laughter echoed through the house whenever they had company. Even if it was only the maid, the sound of their giggling and scuffling would ring through the bungalow like their old samba records while she was left to sit in the chill of the chasm. She didn’t know why they even employed the maid anymore, because while she clocked out well after normal working hours, the bed was not once made. And why is the hot tub always bubbling, she thought.
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There isn’t any grass in this town, it’s just dry earth. Initially this resonated with their childhood fancies of living as maverick cowboys ransacking the Wild West and taking no prisoners. Dreams of galloping across a canyon in the scorching heat with their trusty steed beneath their saddle, their woman in their arms and the thrill of escaping the past within just an inch of their lives. These ideas distracted them from the small garden they’d left behind in the city. They had had a lake, humble in size of course but with a weeping willow and lily pads, and a bench swing that they would sit on together. They had sprinklers and chrysanthemums, and bumble bees and peonies. The only thing that grows in StrangeTown is the green cloud of flies around last night’s dinner that her wife didn’t eat and the maid didn’t clean.
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She must be hallucinating now because from the water she sees fireworks go off through their bedroom window. The room goes dark and the only light is the azure glow from the pool and the faint moonlight across the plains. She sees that mangy stray dog root through their bins and she cries desperately for help. It looks up at her startled, but after realising she can’t shoo it away continues its rummaging. Her arms are starting to fill with acid and she can feel it whoosh around her body with each movement. She tries to save energy by floating on her back as still as possible, maybe she can hold out until the newspaper delivery boy comes by in the morning. Then she remembers that the newspaper delivery boy stopped coming because they kept letting their newspapers go mouldy in the front garden, arguably a job for a maid she always thought.
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Despite all of this, despite everything that has been lost and endured since the move, she is only now in these final minutes understanding the true catastrophe that that damned nuclear disaster really was. Without it, she’d still have the love of her life and she’d still have a future to share with her. Oh and the tween they coparented for a while of course, whatever their name was. She would still have someone who would have at least noticed that she’s been missing for hours now, sinking.
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Her body, and more importantly her broken heart, can’t bear it another moment, so she lets go. The tug of a warm memory beckons her. Maybe she’ll find her wife looking at her lovingly from their seat under the willow. The sting of the water in her eyes pushes tears out, and it’s actually nice. Like when you go to sleep after you’ve been crying. Everything blurs and she starts to gulp it all down. As the water swallows her whole she sees that fateful hooded figure looming above and she hopes she’s going home.