I was four years old the afternoon my eight-year-old sister drowned. Afterward, my mother spiraled into a manic, consuming guilt because she hadn’t pulled her out of the river in time. The following year, on the first anniversary of my sister’s death, my mother took me into the bathroom and shoved my head straight down into a tub filled with freezing water. "Don’t fight it," she hissed, her fingers dug like talons into the back of my neck. "This is exactly how it felt when your sister went under." The shock of the ice-cold water tore into my throat and flooded my lungs. Just as my eyes rolled back and my vision narrowed into the gray tunnel of unconsciousness, she yanked me violently into the air. She crushed my soaking, retching frame against her chest, wailing my sister’s name into my hair: "Mommy saved you! Look, baby, Mommy got to you in time!" From that day on, every single anniversary turned into a grotesque reenactment of her salvation. I was the only prop. When I was six, she decided my panicked thrashing ruined the authenticity of the scene, so she bound my wrists and ankles with tight nylon cord before pushing me under. When I was nine, she reasoned that river water in mid-December was far colder than tap water, so she emptied bags of ice into the porcelain tub and held my skull under the freezing slurry for over sixty seconds. When I was twelve, searching for raw realism, she scooped foul, decaying river mud into the water. I choked on the rot and coughed up blood for two weeks straight. My father never once intervened. He stood in the doorway, an immovable, silent shadow, occasionally flicking an apathetic glance my way—as if he were watching an old kitchen appliance hum before shutting down. Today was my eighteenth birthday. My transition into adulthood. This time, my mother didn’t bother with the bathtub. She drove me out to the edge of the swollen, roaring Blackwood River—the exact bend where my sister had slipped beneath the current ten years ago. She stroked my cheek with cold, trembling fingers, her eyes glittering with feverish devotion. "After today, you’re finally a grown woman. Your sister should have been this old, too." Then, with both hands against my chest, she shoved me off the rocky ledge and straight into the violent, rushing rapids. As the freezing torrent slammed into my chest, tearing the air from my lungs and fracturing my ribs against the hidden stones beneath, I didn’t feel terror. For the first time in eighteen years, I felt an overwhelming sense of release. When my sister slipped beneath the water at eight years old, she only had to die once. Between the ages of five and seventeen, I had died thirteen times over. My only birthday wish this year was that this death would be my last. 1 "Get your ass out of the water right now! Iris, do you hear me? Who do you think you are!" My mother, Eleanor’s, shrill scream pierced the dull roar of the river. I looked down at myself. I was weightless, a pale wisp of vapor hovering two feet above the churning foam. Beneath the surface, the merciless undertow was violently sweeping a broken, lifeless body downstream, slamming it against jagged submerged boulders. That body was mine. The sickening snap of bones was swallowed entirely by the white noise of the rushing water, but I felt none of the pain. Instead, an impossible lightness washed over me. Eighteen years of shivering. Eighteen years of living in a perpetual winter. And now, I was finally warm. Up on the muddy bank, Eleanor was stomping her feet in frustration, the sharp heels of her designer boots sinking deep into the wet silt. She was wearing her tailored black wool trench coat—the grim, theatrical uniform she wore every year on this exact date. "I’m counting to three! If you don't break the surface this second, you can forget about your college allowance for the rest of the year!" Eleanor glared at the turbulent brown water, her eyes blazing with the venom of someone who couldn't stand being disobeyed. No one answered her. Only the rhythmic, hollow slosh of the river against the riverbed stones broke the silence. A few yards behind her, Richard, my father, stood with his hands tucked into his windbreaker, trying to light a cheap cigarette. The flint scraped three, four times against the damp wind before catching. He took a long drag, exhaling a cloud of bitter smoke into the mist. "Give it a rest, Eleanor," Richard said, his tone dry, as if he were discussing a minor traffic delay on the interstate. "You’ve spent over a decade training her lungs. She’s probably just sitting near the bottom holding her breath to spite you." Eleanor let out a sharp, mocking laugh. "Spite me? She wouldn't dare!" She stepped right to the edge, leaning over the rushing spray. "When your sister went down in this exact river, in this exact depth, she didn’t even have the strength to fight the current!" Eleanor screamed toward the empty water. "And you? I push you in for five minutes, and you have the audacity to play games with me?" Hovering above, I looked down at her face, twisted by a toxic cocktail of grief and narcissistic delusion. Cora. That was my older sister’s name. It was always like this. The moment Cora’s name crossed her lips, Eleanor transformed into a fanatic, entirely intoxicated by her own manufactured tragedy. "Eleanor, the current’s pretty vicious today," Richard muttered, flicking an ash into the mud. For once, an ounce of practical thought crossed his face. "Maybe I should grab the fiberglass pole from the trunk and poke around?" Eleanor spun on him, her glare razor-sharp. "Poke around for what? You always soft-pedal her!" she snapped. "This is her baptism into adulthood. If she doesn’t endure this, how is she supposed to carry Cora’s life forward?" Hearing those words, the phantom space where my heart used to beat gave an involuntary throb. "To carry Cora’s life forward." That was the sole premise of my existence. The only reason I had been brought into this world, and the only justification they ever needed to break me over and over again. When I was fifteen, in the dead of winter, I came down with a fever that spiked past 104. I couldn't even stand; I was curled on the bare floorboards of my bedroom, trembling violently. That day coincided with Cora’s death anniversary. Eleanor kicked open my bedroom door holding a plastic bucket filled with dirty, slush-crusted snow she had scraped from the driveway. "Stop playing dead. Get up. It’s time for the bathroom." She grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me across the hallway. "Mom... please, I'm burning up... I'm so cold..." My fingernails scraped against the doorframe, tears mixing with the slick sweat on my face. "Please, not today. I swear, I think I'm going to die..." Eleanor paused for a fraction of a second. Then, the heavy heel of her boot came down hard on the back of my hand. "A fever?" she hissed down at me. "Cora spent an entire night submerged under the ice. Do you have any idea how cold she was? Your little fever is nothing compared to what she suffered! Get in the damn tub!" She dumped the bucket of gray slush into the ice-cold water and shoved my head down. Floating ice cubes cut into my cheeks and lips like tiny blades. I fought underneath, clawing at the slick porcelain while the oxygen was violently squeezed out of my chest. Eleanor stood over the porcelain rim, a mechanical stopwatch ticking in her palm. "Keep still! Cora ran out of strength—you have to replicate her suffering precisely!" Only when my eyes rolled back and my limbs went completely slack did she finally wrench me upward. She cradled my shivering, semi-conscious body against her cashmere sweater, sobbing dramatically toward the ceiling: "Cora! Mommy saved you! Mommy wasn't too late this time!" That fever turned into severe acute pneumonia. I spent two weeks in the ICU. The day I was discharged, Eleanor never showed up. She merely had Richard pass along a message: "Your mother says you’re far too weak. You don't have half of Cora’s resilience. From now on, you wash your face with ice water every morning." And now, on my eighteenth birthday, I had finally delivered the perfect performance. I hadn’t struggled. I had let the river pull me straight down to the dark bed of stones, and I hadn’t surfaced. On the riverbank, Eleanor glanced down at her watch, her brow furrowing deep into an irritated scowl. "Iris! It’s been five whole minutes! Are you still playing dead down there?" She bent over, snatched a jagged river stone, and hurled it into the center of the current. The stone plunged into the brown froth with barely a ripple. "Fine! You want to stay under? Stay there!" She dusted off her leather gloves and turned back to Richard. "Richard, go get the pole from the trunk. She’s probably clinging to the bridge pillar underneath just to give me a heart attack." 2 Richard dropped his half-smoked cigarette onto the gravel and ground it out beneath the heel of his work boot. "I told you not to bring her to the actual river," he grumbled, ambling casually toward the sedan parked up on the shoulder. "The bathtub at home was working just fine." Eleanor crossed her arms over her chest, assuming the posture of a righteous judge. "The bathtub?" she called out after his retreating back. "How could a bathtub possibly replicate the violent sheer force of a current? Cora was lost in wild water. If Iris doesn’t swallow a mouthful of river water, how could she ever truly understand the desperation her sister felt?" I drifted just above Eleanor’s head, watching her righteous fury. Even though I was dead, a phantom shiver traveled through what remained of my soul. A sharp gust of November wind whipped past, scattering dead leaves across the muddy bank. Ten minutes had passed since I was pushed over the ledge. The brown, rushing river gave up nothing. Not even a stray bubble broke the surface. A few elderly locals on their morning stroll along the levee stopped in their tracks, leaning over the wooden guardrail to peer down at the bank. "Excuse me, ma'am!" an older woman wearing a bright yellow safety vest called out, her face knit with worry. "Did you just throw something into the river?" She hurried down the gravel path, her eyes scanning the violent water. "It looked like a whole person just fell in!" Eleanor turned around, her expression dripping with disgust, looking at the woman as if she were an annoying insect. "Mind your own business. I'm disciplining my own daughter. I don't need neighborhood busybodies telling me what to do." The woman froze, her eyes widening in sheer disbelief. "Are you insane? This is the spillway section! The current here could drag a horse under! You pushed your own kid into that? That's attempted murder!" An older man beside her panicked, instantly pulling an old flip phone from his jacket pocket. "We need to call 911 right now. The current’s too strong—this is madness!" The second Eleanor heard the words "call 911", her face darkened. She lunged forward and smacked the man’s hand down before he could dial. "Don't you dare call the police! I told you, she’s my daughter! She’s throwing a tantrum!" Eleanor shouted, her voice shrill and unhinged. "She’s been doing breath-holding drills in freezing water since she was a toddler! She can hold her breath for seven, eight minutes easily! She’s hiding under some weeds right now just to mess with my head!" The old man stumbled back, terrified by the feral madness in Eleanor’s eyes, but he held onto his phone. "You're out of your damn mind! No kid holds their breath in an eight-knot current for eight minutes! You need help!" "Richard! Where the hell are you?" Eleanor shrieked toward the car. "Get over here and get rid of these lunatics!" Richard finally strolled back down the slope, dragging a long, telescoping fishing gaff behind him. Seeing the commotion, he frowned in annoyance. "What’s the shouting about? Move along, folks. It’s just a family matter." He waved his hand dismissively, as if shooing away stray dogs. "A family matter?" the woman cried, pointing an accusing finger right at Richard’s nose. "What kind of father stands there while his kid drowns? Get in the water and pull her out!" Richard’s face turned sour, but his voice remained flat, stubborn. "There's nothing to pull out. Her mother knows what she’s doing. The kid won't die. Besides, she’s doing this on purpose. If I go down there, she’ll just swim somewhere else." Watching Richard’s utter detachment, a memory from my sixteenth year floated back to me. By that winter, the years of freezing water and toxic silt had left me with severe rheumatoid arthritis. Whenever it rained, the inflammation in my knees felt like thousands of red-hot needles digging into the marrow. One afternoon, Eleanor locked me in the unheated basement next to the deep freezer because my practice exam score was two points lower than Cora’s old mock score. She made me stand with my bare skin pressed against the metal siding. "Cora never even got the chance to graduate middle school," Eleanor had hissed. "How dare you bring home anything less than a perfect score?" The pain in my joints was so unbearable that while she went upstairs to take a phone call, I used an old emergency phone I had hidden under a floorboard to dial 911. The moment the dispatcher answered, I sobbed into the receiver: "Please, help me... my mom is freezing me to death in the basement..." Before I could finish the address, a heavy, calloused hand reached from behind and snatched the phone away. Richard. He looked down at the glowing screen, saw "911," and pressed the red button without hesitation. I looked up at him in utter despair. "Dad... please. My joints hurt so bad. I think I'm going to lose my legs..." Richard slipped the phone into his pocket, staring down at me with cold, dead eyes. "Iris, your mother is sick. She carries a lot of pain. Can't you just indulge her a little?" He sighed, trying to sound like a weary peacemaker. "Do you really have to bring the police to our door and tear this family apart? Just endure it. When she calms down, she'll let you out." Then, he turned around and locked the heavy basement door, leaving me in the pitch-black, biting cold. That was the day I realized: Eleanor was the executioner wielding the blade, but Richard was the one who sharpened the steel and dug the shallow grave. Neither of them was innocent. "Gurgle." A small cluster of muddy bubbles suddenly surfaced near a swirl of white foam. A moment later, a single white canvas sneaker bobbed to the surface, caught in the spinning vortex before drifting lazily downstream. It was the new pair I had laced up this morning. "Lord have mercy! Look! That's a shoe!" the woman screamed. She shoved past Eleanor, grabbed the old man’s phone, and dialed emergency services. "Send everyone! Send divers to the South Spillway bridge! A crazy woman just threw her daughter into the river, and she hasn't come up! Hurry!" Eleanor stared at the floating sneaker, her composure cracking for a split second. Only a split second. Then, she let out an even louder, more manic laugh. "Iris, you think you're clever, don't you? Leaving a shoe behind to fake an accident?" She leaned over the bank and screamed into the roar of the water: "Officer! Don't waste your time! It's just a brat seeking attention! She’s an expert swimmer—she’s sitting on the riverbed trying to scare me! The second your sirens get here, she’ll crawl right out!" I looked down at the lone white sneaker disappearing down the river. "Mom... I was never a good swimmer." "I just stopped struggling." 3 The sharp wail of sirens ripped through the heavy morning fog. Two patrol cruisers and a search-and-rescue utility truck screeched to a halt along the levee. Officers and tactical divers in drysuits spilled out of the vehicles, hauling heavy sonar gear and retrieval lines. "What happened? Who called this in?" The lead detective—tall, broad-shouldered, with sharp, intense eyes—marched down the embankment. "Officer! Right here!" the woman in the vest cried out, trembling as she pointed at Eleanor. "This psycho threw her teenage daughter into the spillway! It’s been almost twenty minutes!" The detective looked at the churning, dark water, his face instantly hardening. "Dive team, gear up! Deploy the side-scan sonar and the drag nets immediately!" Two divers began securing their safety tethers, but Eleanor stepped squarely in front of them, blocking their path. "Stay out of the water!" She thrust her chin out, glaring at the first responders like an outraged matriarch whose private property had been trespassed upon. "This is a private family matter! Who gave you permission to interfere?" Eleanor yelled. "My daughter is playing hide-and-seek with me! If you jump in there with all that gear, you’re going to terrify her!" The detective stared at her for two solid seconds, stunned by the sheer absurdity of what he was hearing. "Ma'am, do you have any concept of how fast this spillway is moving? You think a human being has been holding their breath under that for twenty minutes? What do you think she is, a fish?" He shoved her aside with one broad arm. "Interfering with emergency personnel is a felony. I will cuff you right now." Eleanor stumbled, nearly falling into the mud. Richard quickly caught her, flashing a placating, greasy smile at the officer. "Detective, please, don't take it the wrong way. My wife’s had a lot of trauma... she’s not entirely well up here," he said, tapping his temple in a low, conspiratorial whisper. "But honestly, our girl is just acting out. She does extreme breath-holding all the time. It’s like a party trick. She’s fine, really." Hovering above the detective’s shoulder, I looked at Richard’s nauseating facade. He knew. He knew a human brain dies after six minutes without oxygen. He just couldn't bear to let his carefully constructed life crack open. He had spent eighteen years minimizing my slow murder into a "harmless domestic spat." "Back off! Both of you!" The detective shoved Richard away, barking into his shoulder radio: "Team One, sweep the downstream banks! Team Two, probe the deep channels! Move!" "Splash. Splash." Equipped with high-intensity underwater torches and sonar probes, the rescue divers plunged into the freezing, murky depths. Eleanor stood on the bank, smoothing down her windblown hair. A faint, sneering smirk touched her lips as she watched the bubbles churn. "All this drama for nothing," she muttered to Richard. "Do you think Iris planned this whole spectacle just to make the world think I abuse her? How did she turn out so vicious? Cora was an angel, but this one is pure poison." Richard kept his mouth shut, staring blankly at the water. "Vicious?" I laughed—a soundless, hollow laugh. When I was seventeen, I studied until my vision blurred every night and won the prestigious statewide academic scholarship. A full five-thousand-dollar grant. I ran home that afternoon, clutching the official certificate in trembling hands. I had planned to use the money to buy Eleanor the cashmere scarf she had stared at in the department store window for years. I wanted to show her that I was worthy. That I could make her proud. When I knelt by her armchair and presented the envelope, she didn't smile. Her eyes locked onto the gold seal of the certificate, turning colder and more manic by the second. "A scholarship?" she had whispered, her voice shaking with sudden rage. Then came the crack of her hand across my face. "How dare you win a scholarship!" she shrieked, hauling me up by my collar. "Your sister died at eight years old! She never even got to finish elementary school! She will never have a scholarship! Who are you showing off for? Are you bragging that you outlived her? That you're better than her?" That evening, she dragged me out to a stagnant swamp on the outskirts of town. She ripped the certificate and the check into tiny shreds, scattered them into the black muck, and shoved my face down into the decaying swamp water. "Eat it!" she screamed. "Swallow what you owe your sister!" I inhaled toxic silt and coughed blood for weeks. An x-ray later showed permanent fibrous scarring on my lower left lung. That was the day I finally understood: in Eleanor’s eyes, my very breath was a theft of Cora’s existence. "Captain! We have a sonar hit!" A diver broke the surface twenty yards out near the concrete bridge pilings, his voice cutting through my memory. The entire bank fell dead silent. "Depth is roughly thirteen feet, wedged between two support pylons! Definite human silhouette!" The lead detective ran to the water's edge. "Is there any movement? Any vital signs?" The diver took a breath and plunged back under. Fifteen seconds later, he surfaced again. His face was ash-white behind his mask. "No signs of life... The current pinned her against the concrete... her jacket is completely tangled in submerged rebar and weeds." He paused, his voice cracking slightly. "She’s... she’s gone." Silence crashed over the riverbank. The elderly bystanders gasped, tears springing to the woman’s eyes. The detective clenched his fists, spinning on his heel to glare at Eleanor with pure fury. "Is this the 'tantrum' you were talking about?" Eleanor didn't even flinch. She pulled a travel pack of tissues from her trench coat pocket and delicately wiped a speck of mud from her manicured fingers. "Oh, please. Cut the theatrics," she yelled out toward the divers. "Did she pay you guys to put on this little show? How much are you charging per hour? It's very dramatic, really." She took a step toward the water. "Iris Hollis! I'm counting to three! If you don't drag yourself out of that river this instant, don't you ever dare set foot in my house again!" "One!" "Two!" "Splash—" With a heavy heave, three divers surfaced together, hauling a mud-caked, weed-draped body onto the rocky shallows.
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