At the beginning, she comes when Andy takes a bath. Water seems to take a more solid form, as though someone had put it into a well-tanned skin (but this simile soon turns too morbid, so Andy defaults to thinking of water in this new, elastic – plastic, it’s called “plastic”, Andy! – bags).
There are strange whirlpools, but there seems to be a mouth, sucking at her clit, sometimes gently, sometimes with enough force that it’s painful. There seem to be fingers, pushing into her vagina, in and out, in and out, the water drifts and makes small waves, and Andy can’t help it – she casts her hips accordingly, clenches her muscles around that feeling, tries to make these fingers stay inside longer, let her relive the memories.
Of course, it’s like catching water. They spatter into droplets and flow out, escaping her. It’s cruel, just like Andy’s dreams of Quynh were – so many details, so many emotions and so much pain, and yet not enough to pinpoint the exact location.
And there was the final one, when she gives out and takes her final, painful gulp of water. The others stopped dreaming of Quynh after that, but Andy dreamt – relived – that final one for weeks and months. Until the day the water started to touch her.
After some time, the water starts to hum and whisper in a language humanity had long forgotten – but Andy can still understand the words.
‘”Andy” doesn’t suit you at all, Andromache,’ it says on good days. ‘”Andy” is too fluffy, like a word for a rabbit or a small deer, like a word for something cherished. Have you changed so much you allow every stranger to call you with the intimacy you withheld from me for so long? Or are you just lonely?’ The water streams down her neck, and it’s too slow, too deliberate, more like licking and kissing. ‘Poor Andromache. You will be lonely no more, I promise.’
There are bad days, bad nights, too, of course. More and more of them. ‘”Andy” doesn’t suit you at all,’ the whisper under her shower sounds threatening and angry, as though it’d contain a roar of a storm, water rising to crash and destroy. ‘It sounds like a common word. Not a word for a warrior, a goddess, a hero, a menace, Andromache the Betrayer,’ the last is a hiss, and the water twists inside Andy painfully, almost like it’d got claws. Waves and droplets hit her hard, like small fists, and she ends up covered in tiny bruises which fade before she gets out of the bathroom (too quickly, she thinks, too quickly).
And then, one day, she – it (Andy knows it’s not she, not Quynh, just something born out of her suffering and fury, something unleashed by Andy’s failure, something she deserves) – comes from a glass of water. It changes into a finger deep inside Andy’s throat and she gargles and gargles, the rest of the water streams down her neck, hot like bites, and she can’t catch her breath – “just like me”, whispers something inside her neck, “just like me” – and she falls into darkness, suffocating.
She wakes up, of course. New and fresh as ever. The others stand above her, worried.
‘I choked on my water,’ Andy says and laughs it off. They don’t believe her, but they’re willing to give her time, wait for the answer for a century or two.
They would wait forever, thinks Andy. And also: there’re languages where the actual phrase would be “the water choked me”.