March 2026: A Short Story About Drowning – Susan Hobson
A Short Story About Drowning
The first time I drowned, it was my birthday. Thirteen. Dad said we should go out in the tinnie.
“It will make you a man,” Dad says.
The boat shivers, balanced on the swell. The salt wind is smothered by the smell of the outboard motor. The fish in the bottom of the boat kick in vain. Their colours – silver shot with green and purple – will dry out soon. Their eyes are flat and without hope.
Nanna used to tell me stories about the sea. “Deep, deep down,” she’d tell me, “deeper than deep, where the lost things go. That’s where the merfolk live, in their castles of shell.” Dad would push her away and yell if he heard her, so she would whisper them in my ear when he was down the pub, her breath tickling.
Once, when he was shouting at her, she screamed back. “I’m not afraid of you!” I hid my head under my pillow.
My Mum was a lost thing. She went out swimming one day, and she swam and swam and never came back. Now she is a pile of ash inside a funny vase which Dad keeps in a cupboard. But she can’t be a pile of ash, so I’m thinking she’s still in the sea, growing herself a fish tail.
Nanna came to live with us when Mum died. She made me brownies for my lunch box and cut apples into slices for me. Now I just make myself toast, while dad watches footy. The smell of bread browning masks the smell of dead fish.
School’s a different kind of ocean. You learn to avoid the sharks, edge into the shallows, wherever the shoal will let you hide. Rule of thumb: don’t be smart, don’t be dumb. Above all, don’t fight back. Who wants Dad to get a phone call?
One day I come home from school and there’s an ambulance in the driveway. “She slipped on the stairs. An accident,” Dad says. Now there’s another vase in the cupboard.
Anyway, that day on the boat, he hands me some fish guts to throw overboard. I was just starting to swing the bucket when I see a face breaking and reforming under the waves. I know at once whose it is.
The next thing I know I’ve followed the bucket into the water. Green folds over my head like a silent blessing. Bubbles stream past my eyes. My arms don’t know what to do. Should I try to swim?
Up?
Or down?
I’m everywhere and nowhere. I’m emptying out, becoming one with the ocean, with the darkness.
“Come,” she says. “Come deeper.”
I drowned. Even though I was hooked out into the brutal sunlight, pummelled until I opened my eyes and felt the sea retreating. I knew I had drowned.
Soon, I’m going out again, on my own this time.
To go for a swim.
Susan Hobson
Right Left Write’s March prompt was Ocean Depths. New prompts are announced monthly February-November in QWC’s Pen & Pixel email newsletter.
Find out more about Right Left Write at www.queenslandwriters.org.au/rightleftwrite.
Right Left Write’s March prompt was Ocean Depths.