New Story Out Today with The Rumpus!
"Dead Man Sink"
Today, May 26th, I have a new story out with The Rumpus titled “Dead Man Sink.” Read it here! Many thanks to my editor W. S. Gong, illustrator Beatriz Camaleão, and for everyone at the Rumpus for giving this piece a home.
This story is in conversation with my favorite piece of folklore, my 3rd attempt at bringing a worthy iteration to this much-loved and much-trod story tradition. I won’t say which piece of folklore I’m drawing on, in case figuring it out yourself brings some delight.
My first attempt, a fantasy story, was clumsy and unoriginal, and I’m glad it wasn’t picked up by a magazine. My second attempt was better, but I retired it after a couple magazine rejections, realizing that what I’d hoped to explore (queer, medieval, Christian surrealism) was being better excavated in my novel project.
This piece is contemporary, and suburban, and is about—among other things—swimming pools. Swimming pools, for me, are features of hotels and childhood. They are therefore dreamlike and liminal. Both wondrous and uncanny. Manufactured spaces with psychic dimensions bigger than their actual size, with a replenishing moistness similar to the human body, simultaneously sterile and filthy.
Last year I watched video essayist Natalie Wynn play the game Pools, in which you, the player, wander through a labyrinth of indoor pools, locker rooms, and moist, tiled hallways. The game is lonely, mundane, and eldritch in its endlessness. No piece of art has more reminded me more of my own dreams.
These days I’m much more likely to swim outdoors, either in the lake near my home, or one of several swimming holes. When I first moved to Vermont, before anyone introduced me to the much-guarded secret swimming holes or even a popular beach, I’d leave my nannying job and drive to a strange little spot along the lake. I was a lonely person then, though desperately trying not to be, trapped—it felt—in a mind bent on keeping me totally dissociated from other people. I only knew about this beach because every day I pushed my little ward in her stroller past the rickety steps it lay beneath. Its sands are a trash heap of driftwood, algae, and sharp rocks—not a beach for bare feet. Hardly anyone was ever there but me.
Shallow for a long, long way, I’d wade out until the trees on the beach looked small and then behold the smooth thigh-high waters that surrounded me in strange, god-like hugeness. There, at last, I was alone enough for my mind to release me. For a few precious moments, I’d experience clarity of mind.
I was still battling that anxiety last year when I was spontaneously invited to a swimming hole with my partner and a group of acquaintances. This spot features a series of boulders along a river that collects the water into natural roofless water rooms. Behind the boulders, the river creates a mildly perilous water slide, which one can experience by pulling themself upstream along the boulder walls, angling themself back or belly down, then letting go. After choosing one of these pools, and without any detectable hesitation, almost everyone else stripped naked and slipped in.
Surrounded, then, by beautiful naked acquaintances, playing in the water, natural as otters !
I only hesitated a little. Then, in animal bareness, I entered the water too. Clambered over smooth dark stone beneath cedar trees washed in sunlight. Pulled myself hand-over-hand upstream, then let the powerful waters beat me down along the underwater rocks. People surrounded me, and yet I was flushed with joy, my mind nervous by happily so, and clear.
