by Antonia Rachel Ward
My father killed himself on his twenty-eighth birthday. It wasn’t until I turned twenty-eight myself that I understood how short his life had been. Each subtle change I saw in myself reminded me that every day I lived now would make me one more day older than he had ever been.
It felt like a transgression.
Two years have passed since then. I came to the lake house for solitude, but the loneliness of this place is overwhelming. The only movement is the moonlight flowing like quicksilver over the water’s inky surface. The only sound is the gentle lap of the waves on the pebble beach. There is no phone line. No internet. I could drive for miles and pass nothing but an empty gas station.
The water sings to me. A siren’s song.
I never knew him. My parents had me young. Things didn’t work out. I was eight when I learned he had died. The loss was formless, yet infinite. It made barely a pinprick in the fabric of my life, but the more I tried to examine the hole, the more the edges frayed, until the emptiness became too vast to comprehend.
When I reached twenty-nine, I thought I had escaped. I met you and became lulled by your warmth. The last time I was here, you were with me. The house – my inheritance – had been boarded up for years. You gave it life. I remember you standing knee deep in the lake, golden hair shining beneath the sun, turning back to me, inviting me in. The light glittered over the water like scattered diamonds. But the heat wouldn’t penetrate my skin. I couldn’t bring myself to join you.
“You could be his reflection.” Growing up, it was all anyone ever said to me. Old friends of his would catch their breath. When I found the photographs hidden in the attic of the lake house, I understood why my grandparents could hardly bear to lay eyes on me. Their grief was still too raw. I clung to the pictures; took them home; added them to my own.
Sometimes I forget which photographs are me and which are him.
Did I push you away, after that visit to the lake? I know that’s how you tell it. Really, I think you were only protecting yourself. You sensed the inevitable. Now, everyone else has begun to detach themselves too. They look straight through me, to the space that he left behind.
Genetic memory. The ties that bind me to him are deeper than blood and bone. I sit by the lakeside, feeling the foam wash over my feet. Tomorrow I turn thirty. Each stolen day is another weight.
I watch the waves, each ripple an echo of one that went before.
The siren’s song rises to a wail.
ANTONIA RACHEL WARD is a writer of horror, Gothic and speculative fiction based in Cambridgeshire, UK. Her short stories have been published by Black Hare Press and Quantum Shorts. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Ghost Orchid Press. ‘Song to the Siren’ was her first ever short story, inspired by Tim and Jeff Buckley.
You can find her at antoniarachelward.com or on Twitter @antoniarachelw1.
