The Return
Years after silencing the woman who betrayed him, Eric returns to the site of her watery grave.
I remember that night clearly — the smell, most of all.
It wasn’t the sea. Not really. Not the salt or brine or the usual tang of winter’s tide. No, what lingered under the Shawl Canal Bridge was the stench of decay. It clung to everything. It got in your teeth, your hair. Even your thoughts began to rot if you stood too long in it.
Eric had returned after five years, but I think part of him never really left. Some part stayed down there, soaked into the wet concrete and fish-scaled steel. He stood on that crumbling fishing platform again, waves boiling beneath him, spray whipping up into his face, and stared down into the abyss where she still slept.
Julia.
He’d murmured her name like a prayer—or a curse. I don’t know if he loved her. I don’t think he even knew anymore.
I remember watching him drop a pebble into the dark. It vanished like everything else in that place. And then he smiled — white teeth glinting like bones in a grave — and whispered something into the wind. Something I wish I hadn’t heard.
“Darkness is my gift for you, my love.”
He unpacked the gear as if setting a dinner table. Calm, measured. The gym bags, the yellow tank, the regulator. There was no rush in him. He had done this before.
But it wasn’t diving he’d done. It was disposing.
It all came back to him, I’m sure — what he’d done that night. The fight. The panic. Her hands were clawing at his. And that moment, too late, when he realised she wasn’t struggling anymore.
She was already dead.
He hadn’t planned it. At least, that’s what he told himself, over and over. But the way he used the storm to hide her, the way he opened all those hatches to let the sea consume her and take the bridge section down with her corpse… that didn’t seem like the actions of a man caught in a moment.
No. That was something darker. Something willing.
And now, five years later, they were planning to raise that sunken section. State engineers. Survey crews. Clean the place up and improve it. More lanes. More lights. More traffic.
More visibility.
So Eric went back. Not for guilt. Not for grief. He went back to erase the last traces of her. To make sure nothing was left for them to find.
I watched him slip into the water like a shadow returning to its source. The current was unnaturally still that night, the tide holding its breath.
He dove deep. Past the silver fish and flaking kelp. Past the rotted cables and the remnants of the bridge’s belly. Down, down, where light begins to die and the world forgets your name.
The structure was there, transformed. Not a bridge section anymore, but a reef. A cathedral of strange, swaying life. It had become something else. And yet, the hatches remained — clean, untouched, as if guarded.
Except for one.
It was open.
I don’t think he hesitated, even when he got stuck — half in, half out — kicking like a bug in a bottle neck. He cursed her name, even then. Blamed her for what he was doing, for what he had done.
And still, he went in.
Inside was… wrong. Too much life for that kind of darkness. Anemones coated every surface in endless white. Glowing spores danced in the water like dying stars. Eric searched. Tore through that carpet of false snow, looking for bones, maybe. A skull. Anything that might give him away.
He found nothing.
But the hatches… they found him.
One by one, they sealed. Silent and final.
And then, the light began to fade. First, his flashlight. Then… the world.
I don’t know how long he tried to pry his way out. I don’t know when the voice came. But I know he heard it — because I heard it too.
My love… You came back.
It came from everywhere. And nowhere.
He tried to run. There’s nowhere to run in water, not really. You just flee — until the dark catches you.
She did.
I don’t know what became of him down there in that drowned chamber. No one ever found his body. But I think… I think the sea took him the same way he gave her to it.
And now, I dream of them sometimes. Down in that tomb of coral and silence. Two shadows drifting through a dead cathedral, her voice echoing like waves against the hull of a forgotten ship:
You always made things so hard, Eric.
And the worst part?
She sounds like she’s smiling.
💕
