Wanting Waters

This short story was written for the now canceled Wrecked Anthology. FYI: It’s very different from The Hollow Gods.

It is the first of several short stories I’ll be sharing, so it’s free from the jump. The others will go out to paid subscribers first once they’re re-edited.

Enjoy! 🖤

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I had heard every explanation they offered for why the Titanic sank.

None of them spoke of the things that loved each other beneath the surface. And what they cost the rest of us…

I stepped out onto the balcony for air, dressed only in my nightdress and the thin robe I had taken to wearing since I no longer had anyone to see me in it. Sleep became unreliable in those weeks. It did not come at all, or it came too vividly, returning my husband to me in ways that made waking feel like a second loss.

I spent twenty years being the most capable person in every room I walked into. Chairing committees had been my domain. I managed the accounts my husband signed his name to, and once redirected an entire charity auction when the guest of honor arrived drunk and the vicar’s wife began to cry.

Yet being alone was a vast, unknown territory to me.

Books filled my sleepless nights on this voyage. The myths of the Greeks. The sagas of the Norse. It had seemed appropriate to fill the silence with stories older than my grief.

The night met me colder than I expected. Not sharp, not biting. Something quieter. A chill that sank into my skin.

It had been waiting for me, I thought.

I remember thinking the sea looked too still.

It stretched out beyond the railing in a dark, unbroken expanse, swallowing the ship’s lights without reflection. The water’s indifference had drawn me out of my cabin. There was a kind of mercy in knowing something in the world remained vast enough to hold my grief without remarking on it.

But that night, the water did not feel empty. It felt… occupied.

The usual sounds had softened. The steady rush along the hull, the low percussion of waves, all of it seemed dampened, as if the ocean had drawn a breath and held it. Even the ship’s movement changed underneath my feet. Still forward, still certain, but quieter somehow. Careful.

I should have gone back inside then.

I remember the thought very clearly. That small, sensible instinct to retreat, to close the door and return to the lamplit safety of my cabin. But I did not move. There was a pull to the stillness, not strong enough to frighten me, only enough to persuade.

Stay, it seemed to say. Look.

The water shifted. Not with the wind, I would have understood that, but against itself. One current moved where another did not permit it, crossing in a way that made no sense to me. The surface darkened then lightened, as though something vast beneath it had turned.

I gripped the railing, the cold biting through my palms, and tried to name what I saw. Grief, I told myself. Fatigue. The mind makes patterns when it is given too much silence.

And yet, I had the strangest sense I was not alone.

Not in the way one feels watched. Not quite. Something broader, something that had nothing to do with me at all. The awareness did not settle on me. It moved through me, like I was no more than air.

And still, I could not look away. For a moment—only a moment—I saw them.

Not clearly. Not as one sees another person. But as interruptions in the dark, defined by the way the water bent around them. One vast and pressing, the other drawing inward, patient and unyielding. The sea answered to them both and neither, pulled taut between opposing wills.

The surface broke without warning. Not violently. Not with the drama I might have expected from something so vast. A displacement, a folding of the water that lasted less than a breath, and within it, a shoulder. Dark as deep water, broad enough to make the ocean look modest. A jaw that made every marble Poseidon statue I’d ever seen an insult to what surfaced for a single breath. There and gone before I could decide if I had seen it at all.

I told myself it was fatigue. I was not entirely convincing.

I thought they were fighting. It would have been easier if they had been.

Because even before I understood, before the ship began to tremble beneath my feet, I felt something in the way they moved. Not soley destruction. Intention as well. Focus. A terrible, consuming attention that thinned the air in my lungs.

I had been married long enough to recognize it. Not the shape of it. Not the scale. But the moment before touch when refusal becomes something else.

The sea tightened.

I felt it first in my chest, a pressure that made each breath shallow, as if the air itself thickened. The stillness did not break. It sharpened. Every sound seemed drawn inward, pulled taut to a point I could not see.

The movement below shifted again. What I had taken for opposition grew closer, the distance between those vast, unseen presences narrowing, making me grip the railing.

I was witnessing something private, I thought. Something I had no right to see.

Absurd, I thought.

The ship gave a faint, almost imperceptible shudder under my feet. I might have imagined it, if not for the way the water answered, rippling outward, then drawing sharply back, as though correcting itself.

My hands tightened on the steel. I remember thinking it again. more urgently this time. The corridor beyond my door would be warm, lit, ordinary. There would be voices, perhaps laughter, the distant clink of glass. The world would still be arranged in ways I understood.

But I remained where I stood. Because the sea no longer felt distant. It pressed close.

The surface broke. Not with a wave, but with a distortion, a folding of water that revealed nothing and everything at once. I could not see them, not truly, and yet I knew where they were. One pressing forward with a force that bowed the water around it, the other yielding just enough to draw it further in.

Not retreating. Drawing closer.

I saw her then. Not fully. Not in any way I could have described to a magistrate or a priest. But enough.

Rán, I thought, half mad with cold and certainty. Her name had filled the pages I read by lamplight three nights before.

Pale as seafoam, vast as tide, her hair spreading through the water like something that had never learned to be still. And the way she moved toward what reached for her… not retreating, not resisting, but rising.

I looked away.

Then, God help me, I looked back.

I had read enough to know Poseidon and Rán had no business in the same waters. Different stories. Different seas. Yet here they were, and the ocean seemed entirely indifferent to the contradiction.

There are things a woman of reasonable sense and adequate experience understands about want. My husband had been a generous man in the ways that mattered, and I had not been indifferent to it. I knew what it looked like when desire stopped asking permission.

This was that.

Stripped of every human hesitation. Scaled to something for which no polite language existed.

I gripped the railing until my knuckles ached. I tried to convince myself it did not affect me. The heat in my face suggested otherwise.

The realization came slowly, and then all at once.

They were not fighting.

My breath caught. Not from fear, not entirely, but from something sharper, something that felt dangerously like recognition. I’d seen this before, in smaller, safer ways. The way my husband once looked at me across a room, intent and certain. The way distance had collapsed under his gaze alone.

But this… This was something stripped of gentleness. Of hesitation. It was want without restraint.

The water swelled.

The ship lurched more noticeably this time, a subtle shift that sent a tremor through the metal beneath my hands. Somewhere, distantly, voices lifted. Not in alarm, not yet, but in question.

The night did not answer.

The forces below closed the last of the distance between them. I felt it like a change in the air, a sudden, unbearable pressure heavy against my ribs, my throat, my skin. The sea seemed to fold inward on itself, drawn tight around a point of contact I could not see but could not ignore.

I could not breathe. Not properly. Not fully. Each inhale felt borrowed, insufficient, as though the air had been claimed by something larger. My fingers slipped against the railing, numb with cold or something like it.

And still, I did not look away. Because whatever passed between them in that moment, whatever terrible, consuming attention held them together, I could not turn away from it.

I began, impossibly, to see it. Not as it truly existed, but as something my mind could almost hold.

A form bent toward another. Indistinct, shifting, the suggestion of a body drawn close. A line that might have been the curve of a back. A movement that might have been a hand closing where the water tightened.

And the answering motion… not retreat, but pull.

I did not understand what I saw, yet I gleaned what it meant. And I thought of him. Not as he was at the end. Pale, diminished, half-absent, but as he had been before.

One evening, years ago, standing behind me at the washstand, his hands settling at my waist, suggesting they had always belonged there.

He had not pulled me closer, only rested his hands there, the weight of his touch certain and familiar.

I had leaned back into him without thinking. It was enough.

The memory held for a moment, soft, contained, and complete. Then it broke.

Because what moved in the water was nothing like it. There was no gentleness. No pause. No question of whether it was wanted.

The impact, when it came, was almost underwhelming.

A low, drawn-out shudder ran the length of the ship, more felt than heard. We suffered no great crash, no immediate violence—only a subtle, undeniable change, as though the world itself shifted a fraction to one side.

I blinked, disoriented. For a moment, I thought it had nothing to do with what I had seen. That the ship and the sea were separate things again.

The water below surged, sharp and sudden, and I knew.

They had not been separate at all. Something had been caught between them.

Voices rose now. Clearer, closer. Doors opened. Footsteps pounded in the corridor. The ordinary world returning too late.

I should have turned then. Gone inside, closed the door, become once more a passenger among many, subject to the same confusion, the same fear.

Instead, I leaned forward. I did not know why… still do not know why.

The water called to me. Not in sound, not in words, but in a pull I felt low in my body, in the hollow place grief had carved and left unfilled. It was not violent nor forced.

It was an invitation.

The railing pressed hard against my waist as I leaned, the dark expanse below widening, deepening, drawing me in. The cold no longer felt like absence.

It felt like a promise. Like release. For a moment, a single, suspended moment, I craved it.

I wanted to go over, to fall into the vast, waiting dark and be taken by it, held by something that did not hesitate, did not falter, did not leave.

The pull sharpened.

My breath hitched, my balance shifting dangerously forward, my hands loosening on the rail. The sea seemed closer now than it should have been, rising without movement, meeting me where I stood.

And then it vanished. Not faded. Not weakened. It simply… withdrew.

The pressure lifted all at once, leaving me gasping, my grip tightening painfully as awareness rushed back in its wake. The water below returned to distance, to depth, to something that no longer reached for me at all.

I staggered back, my heart striking hard against my ribs, my breath ragged in the cold air. For a moment, I could not understand what had changed.

Then I realized it was meant for me.

Whatever moved below the surface turned elsewhere, its attention drawn away as completely as it had come. I had not been chosen.

Only… forgotten.

A shout rang out behind me. Another. Louder this time, edged with something that had not been there before. Fear, perhaps. Or the beginning of it.

I turned at last, the door to my cabin standing open, light spilling out across the balcony floor. The world I understood waited just beyond it, bright, urgent, and unraveling.

Behind me, the sea moved again. The ship answered it.

I knew what had happened before anyone else thought to be afraid. Because I was standing at the railing when the world beneath us shifted, and I had seen what caused it.

I said nothing.

What would I have said? That two things older than modern language found each other in the dark below the hull, and we were simply in the way? That the ship had not struck anything tangible? That it had been forgotten by something vast and powerful?

I went inside, crossed my cabin, and opened the door.

The corridor was bright and strange. A steward moved along it with his hands clasped behind his back, his face arranged into the expression of a man paid to be calm. Two women in evening dresses stood at the far end, one holding the other’s arm, both listening to something I could not hear.

The ship still moved. That was the thing confusing people at first. It continued to press forward, as if nothing had changed. As though forward were still possible.

It was not.

I returned to my cabin and sat on the edge of the bed. I did not pack. I had the strange, clear thought that it didn’t matter what I brought with me, because the woman who boarded the ship in Southampton no longer existed in any meaningful sense. She had gone over the balcony, or near enough. Whatever came next would have to begin from nothing.

The ship listed once more while I sat there. Subtle. Undeniable. A glass shifted on the washstand.

In the corridor, someone laughed the sharp, dismissive sound people make when they are refusing to understand something. I had made such a sound myself, at other thresholds, in other circumstances. I recognized it for what it was.

The laughter stopped.

After that, fragments.

This is the part I cannot give you in order, no matter how many years I have had to arrange it. The mind does not keep disasters cleanly. It keeps sensation. Impression. The way cold has a smell, or how a crowd in a narrow passageway sounds different from a crowd in a ballroom. Lower, more animal, stripped of its social intentions.

Bodies in the corridor.. Not running yet, but purposeful in a way that had not been there an hour before. A child’s shoe, inexplicably alone. A distant, low percussion. Something straining that should never have strained.

At some point, a man I did not know took my arm and steered me toward the stairs. I let him, both of us all too aware of my nightdress, my thin robe, the inadequacy of both. I realized I had not put on shoes. These details seemed very important and completely beside the point simultaneously.

I do not recall how I made it out of my cabin again.

On deck, the cold felt different from the chill on the balcony. That had been coldness with something underneath it, something alive. This was just cold—the world stripped of whatever presence had inhabited it an hour earlier, leaving only absence.

They were gone. Whatever passed between them in the dark beneath us had resolved itself, moved through and beyond, leaving the sea to its own indifference and the rest of us to consequence.

It was then the guilt arrived.

Not the guilt of having done something. The guilt of having watched. Of having stood at the railing and witnessed something I had no right to see, and felt, God help me, something other than horror as I watched it then gone inside and thought only about myself.

While the ship was already dying.

I thought of the women in the corridor. The two in evening dresses, listening. The child whose shoe I stepped around without stopping. The steward with his trained composure, doing the small human work of keeping people calm for as long as possible.

I had known. I knew before any of them.

And I had gone to sit alone in my cabin and contemplate my own transformation.

The lifeboats were already being uncovered when I reached the upper deck. The crew moved with the deliberate efficiency of people who had rehearsed for something and were now finding the rehearsal failed to prepare them for the weight of the real thing. A woman near me cried quietly and rhythmically, as though she had been at it for some time. A man argued with an officer about something, his voice too controlled, his hands betraying him.

I found the railing once more. A different one, and the sea below it.

The unnatural stillness had broken completely, and the water shifted in sharp, uneven swells that caught what light remained then let it go again. The ship groaned around us. A sound felt more than heard, something deep in the body’s register that the ears almost couldn’t catch.

And yet.

Beneath the chaos, beneath the voices and the cold, under the low, animal terror of a crowd discovering its situation, I felt something that had not left.

They were gone. I was certain of that, the way you are certain of a room emptied of someone you love, even before you check.

But the water remembered.

Whatever passed between them had left a charge in the sea itself, something that hummed at the edge of perception, neither warm nor cold but present. The ocean witnessed something, and it had not yet finished holding it.

I stood there as the ship continued its slow, inevitable yielding. I had been the most capable person in every room I walked into for twenty years. I could not think of a single thing to do.

How I came to be in a lifeboat I cannot fully account for. Hands guided me. Rope burned my palm. We dropped too fast and someone near me made a sound I have never been able to describe. Not a scream. Something older and primal.

I remember looking back as we descended.

The ship remained lit. That was the obscenity of it. All those lights, burning as normal, as though illumination were the same thing as safety. It rose against the dark sky with the grandeur of something that did not yet know it had already lost.

Then it began. Not quickly. Not as one imagines. A long, almost-graceful yielding, and then the water, then the sounds.

The sounds.

Deafening, thunderous roars. The shrill scream of metal tearing.

The sea closed over the ship without ceremony.

The water calmed. Not entirely, not at once, but in a way that felt deliberate, as if whatever force disturbed it had settled again into something quieter, more contained. The sharp motion of the waves softened. The surface drew itself smooth between them, dark and vast and almost still.

Almost.

I found myself looking down into it. I did not know how long I watched before I saw her.

At first, I thought it the shifting of bodies below the surface, the slow, unnatural drift of those who had not been lifted back into the boats. But there was purpose in it. Direction.

She moved through the water as though it welcomed her, as if it parted willingly at her passing. There was no struggle, no violence in her motion. Only certainty.

She did not hurry. She did not hesitate. One by one, she gathered them. Not with cruelty. Not with kindness. With something far more complete than either.

I knew, without understanding how I knew, that she had been there before the ship, before the night, before any of us thought to cross such a stretch of sea. What she took had always been hers to take.

She passed beneath us.

For a moment, one terrible, luminous moment, I felt it again.

Not the pull of grief this time. Something worse. She was magnificent. Purposeful. She did not hesitate, did not falter, did not leave anything she claimed. I felt my hands loosen on the lifeboat’s edge before I understood what I was doing.

Come, something said. Not in words. In want.

I leaned toward the water.

Then she disappeared. The pull released so completely I nearly wept from the absence of it. Not relief. Loss.

I do not think she saw me. Or if she did, I was not what she had come for.

That broke something small and stubborn in my chest. To not even be worth claiming.

The water closed behind her. The surface stilled. The night became only night again.

In the years since, I have listened as they tried to make sense of it. Ice, they say. Speed. Negligence. They spoke of steel and human error, as if the world were governed by things that could be measured and corrected.

I do not argue with them. It is easier this way.

But sometimes, when the sea is quiet and the air feels as though it is waiting, I remember the way the water moved that night. The way it bent and gathered, the way it held something vast between opposing wills.

I remember what I saw below the surface. And what it cost the rest of us.

I thought I understood what it meant to love someone once.

Yet the gentlest version of it was all I had ever known.

So many years later, I still hunger for the other side of it.

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