On Lessons Learned in Dark and Water

I fell into the small pool behind our house when I was almost three, not quite finished with being two. Family lore has it that my older sister pulled me out immediately, but that is not my memory. I only remember looking into the small pool and then falling in headfirst.

The Irish say the dobhar-chú live in pools. A cryptid or mythical animal said to look like an otter crossed with a dog. Covered with fur, a mouth festooned with snarling teeth. Denizens of ponds and pools and lakes.

I don’t know if I saw a dobhar-chú while I was falling. I think I was wondering why my skin was wet when it had once been dry. Why the sides of the pool were so far away that I couldn’t get any purchase. 

The truth is, there was already enough for me to worry about on dry land. Particularly at night, when I was put to bed and the light was turned out. After the door was shut and the shadows began to emerge. 

I had no words for what I saw then. Shadows, ink spots, spilling out from the wall, reaching toward me with long arms. Teeth like a serrated knife. 

I don’t know what possessed my mother to insist my older sister room with me night after night that summer when we went to the Jersey shore. It must have fed its own kind of resentment, a very particular breed of dobhar-chú.

What else would grow in the dark if you were not permitted to sleep? Nothing but a kind of half demon. Staggering, snarling, refused rest and half mad with exhaustion. 

Each night, the same story: The bed. The light. The door. The shadows. 

I don’t know if I ever slept. 

Just as I don’t know how long my sister waited before she reached out a hand to pluck me out of the water. What she thought while she watched me tumbling to the bottom of that old pool. The one that we had been staring into together just a moment before. A tiny deep pond where goldfish once swam, lighting up the murky depths with their ribbons of color. And whether, for a moment after the splash, she shook the drops from her skin like rain.