Books
Read an excerpt from Swimmers in Winter
Sep
Certain Women meets The Mars Room in Swimmers in Winter, a sharp and stylistic debut collection by Faye Guenther published in August 2020.
Swimmers in Winter swirls between real and imagined pasts and futures to delve into our present cultural moment. These are soul-searching, plot-driven character studies.
Read an excerpt from the story “Flood Lands” below.
Twice that I can remember, the river blossomed up its insides—moisture cleaving every surface, drips of water running like teeth along the edges of walls and ceilings. Afterwards, I would ride my bike, spraying up the muddy streets, my hands wrapped around the handlebars like a lover. The soaked landscape would pour by, a drowning village, a waterlogged dream.
Once, the river took our cattle, the group of them standing together in a haphazard circle, stamping their feet and shaking their heads at the wind and the rain that tunnelled round them. The river swept them all, a jangle of bodies into its rush and roll. It also washed away the birds, their great plumage going under like festival sails. It took our necessary objects: blades, beds, the fires on which we cooked. It stole the warped musical instruments bent by time and earlier floods, the scarce few photographs of children who are now old women and men far beyond recognition.
The river stole the one faded image of my great-great-aunt, Carmen. She was a warrior in her time, one who turned away from battle, into what life had left—and like me, she had no children. When she died, those who loved her named her a warrior of peace. I heard she used to ride a bike, motorized, without pedals to make it move. I have her name now, as well as my own that means song-maker and builder. But I find myself wondering if any of this matters now. Because the river will take it all away.
This last time, it took Ella’s baby.
Some days, when I dream of the baby, she is laughing, other days crying. But always she is floating. Her little round legs kicking like puckery fins. Her face as visible to me as the moon.
The women crowded around Ella, weeping. And then they began to cook, spreading rich smells of food into the thickness of new moisture and the billowing clouds of insects. Nothing was dry here. Nothing was without the taste of something just gone.
They say that cries of grief bring us closer to our animal selves. I have come to believe this is true. To care for Ella is to live with a wolf or a nightingale.
They also say sadness dulls the tongue. Even so, or despite this, the women salvaged what they could from their soaked provisions. They went out further, where the waters hadn’t touched, they hunted, and what they brought back they poured into their cooking for Ella’s loss. I confess my tongue burned and leaped with the flavours they created, as I sat quietly, eating with my dancing mouth, and brushing away the little stabs of the mosquitoes that clung to my uncovered skin.
I ate as if I knew this food made by the grieving women would give me the strength to sleep, and it is there that I would meet Ella’s baby in my dreams.
While my plate was filled and passed to me, collecting others’ tears as it went from hand to hand, I watched Ella. She sat close by, but her body was in knots, her face turned away. Every bite of food carried the sensation of being alive.
Over a year ago, she had arrived in our village to take over her brother’s home and care for his few cattle, while he left to find work in a larger town. She stayed a stranger to us, mostly because she was fierce about living on her own. I would glimpse her as I was riding my bike along the riverbank in the evenings. Ella lay on her side on a blanket, pillows of grass under her pregnant belly and between her legs, with an open book held close, reading it in the dying light. Seeing her there, resting intently in her weight on the ground, I almost forgot my legs turning the pedals. She had been working with the other women in the fields since the early morning, but now her body relaxed while her mind laboured and danced. How full, crowded even, she seemed, with something I imagined was pleasure.
It was not too long after this, and about five months before the flood, that Ella gave birth to her daughter.
Most people well enough to work with their bodies have left the village by now, headed for higher ground. I hear stories of what is out there, not so far away, closer to the sea—miles and miles of rusted, peeling, broken structures strewn across the land, hulking shapes like beached whales, their webbed plastic flesh torn away from their ribbed metal frames. Into the giant fruit of industry, the natural world is moving. It disassembles and it fills everything.
Whole cities have fallen, they say. Scattered leftovers, fragmented, flattened, earthbound. Only trees grow tall above us now.
I’ve been asked what I’m still doing here in this village half wrecked by the river, with the old people in their last days, women with young children or babies who are unable to go, and men who can’t afford to leave others behind.
My name is for song-making and for building, I tell them, so that is what I’m here for.
But to myself I think, maybe there’s a hidden part of me afraid to leave, and so my home will take me under with it in the end. Or else I will ride my bike until it weakens and breaks apart beneath me, and then I’ll walk away. The other warriors of peace are gone. I have no family left.
For now, there’s still work for me here in the village. I’m called on to do repairs, to help build and rebuild. As soon as I was old enough, but still a young girl, I started learning how to work with my hands.
Also, I can sing.
I was asked by the women to stay with Ella at night. I confess this was something new to me. My hands shook. Ella lay curled inwards on her sleeping mat, her eyes like cracks slit by pain watering down her face. All I could do was sing to her. When she shook desperately, taking raging, reluctant gulps of air, I sang. As she travelled restless through a long tunnel of haunted sleep, I sang softly, so that she knew someone was still with her.
I was never taught how to read or write. We have no paper. There are so few books left. I listen instead, and I work with my hands. Words are just sounds and the feeling of something. I can memorize stories told aloud, and I make my own songs like writing into the air. I build.
Still, there are dreams I have. Stories that take on life in my mind. In dreams, Ella lays me down and names things as she draws shapes across my body that I come to realize are letters—one letter into the next, as lips or limbs meet, until they form words as patterns of touch across my skin. Just by the lines she draws, soft and hard, fast and slow, I want to believe I could know all the words that matter to her most by feeling them, their different shapes: names of a sister and two brothers, a mother and a father, words from pages in a book she remembered, and those others she drew—maybe her children yet to come, mine and hers. But the baby’s name, she never speaks aloud, even though all the time it is there inside her to be said. It is the only word I know by her touch alone, not by her voice—her mouth moving silent around the shape of a sound I cannot decipher.
Sometimes, I dream Ella is looking for the baby inside of me. She would go that deep, be gone so far below, searching, holding herself inside, that when she finally comes to surface, she is breathing hard, gasping. Sometimes, in my dreams, she doesn’t know how to stop, and I can sense her diving again and again—this insistent, tender thrust of her search. Sometimes, she pulls me under too, and we search for the baby together. There, in the ebb and pull, wave after wave, when we rise, we are drenched with each other. Our bodies bearing scars, we trace and erase and retrace them.
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