Water Witching

by Cate McGowan

Sarah Lee

You know how they say it takes seven years to replace every cell in your body? I counted. It’s been seven years since I left the sea, and still the salt crusts my knees. Still, I sometimes wake with a kelp taste in my mouth or something brackish clinging to my molars. I suppose that’s what happens when your mother tries to make you amphibious.

It’s not a metaphor. My mother meant it; she said that if she could raise a child to belong equally to land and water, she could unmake the loneliness of the shore.

“Land births you, water keeps you,” she said once, screaming at the sea, drunk and kneeling in the sand as the spume rolled over her. “Douse this kid and see!”

My mother taught swimming lessons at the municipal pool. She had hair the color of stormlight, a body like a tern’s, angular, improbable. The kids adored her. The parents didn’t. But every kid she instructed swam like a fish. And she never lost one, not once. Except me. I drifted.

Mom was a dowser of children. She believed that divining was her calling, believed that aquatic immersion would save everyone. Literally. Babies, toddlers, even wary six-year-olds clinging to pool noodles. On the first day of lessons, she dunked each kid backward into the blue as if they were being baptized.

My own lesson wasn’t part of the curriculum. I must’ve been nine. Too old to cry when water got up my nose, too young to know Mom wasn’t joking.

She took me to the town lake after dusk and told me we were going to practice staying under for the ocean.

“We’re going to learn the real silence,” she said, her breath spicy with fennel tea and rum.

“Not the kind you get from closing your mouth.”

That night, the lake was glassy, humming with insect halos. She walked us in waist-deep, her hand on the back of my neck. Then she pressed down.

“I won’t let you die,” she said. “I just want to see what you’ll find.”

It’s a strange thing, being submerged by someone who loves you. Your body says fight. Your heart says wait. I kicked, then I didn’t. I remember the sound disappearing, as though someone had clapped thick velvet over the world. Just the rush of blood and bubbles. A gilled hush.

I think I saw things.

A white door on the lake floor, for one.

A school of fish spelling words I didn’t yet know how to read.

A child’s rocking horse, bleached and coral-ribbed, mossy like a shipwreck.

Other wonders I cannot remember.

She pulled me up after, I don’t know, thirty seconds? A minute? Long enough for something to get in. Water, certainly. But something else, too. A longing I’ve never been able to rinse clean.

She kissed my temple roughly. “You stayed. Most kids can’t.”

We never talked about it again. But after that, Mom let me skip lessons and walk along the shore while she coaxed the other children to the deep.

What still gut-punches me is I loved her more for the near-drowning, for showing me that part of her was ocean, that she wanted me to be part ocean, too. What a thing to be loved into silence.

Later, I moved far inland the minute I could. Now I teach biology at a community college in a town with no visible body of water. I tell myself this is freedom.

But some nights, especially when the cicadas are thick and the air tastes as if something was just extinguished, I dream I’m under again. Sometimes Mom’s there, humming.

Sometimes there’s only blackness, and the door opens on the lake floor. But I don’t go through. I just watch the dark water drift, mouth-wide, waiting to see if it speaks first.

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Cate McGowan is the author of four books. Her poetry collection Sacrificial Steel is forthcoming from Driftwood Press in 2025. Brill published her memoir-essays, Writing is Revision, in 2024; Gold Wake Press released her novel, These Lowly Objects, in 2020; and her debut, True Places Never Are (2015), won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her work appears in Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, North American Review, Shenandoah, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Visit her at www.catemcgowan.com.