Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

then walked in silence, and I could pretend for a moment that I was the person he imagined. To get to the water, you had to climb uphill till the backs of your legs began to burn and your knees felt as if they would shake, and your skirts, as they moved around your ankles, felt like a burden. I tucked the ends into the waist of my dress, running them through my legs, which delighted Emmanuel. But I felt annoyance at the walk and the heat that he had not prepared me for. We had left in the afternoon, because he had wished to talk with his father first and we had wanted to miss the highest heat of the day. But the heat had lingered, and even the woods all around us felt oppressive.

I did not trust his admiration for me. The only person who had ever watched my movements as closely as he did was my mother. And she had watched not with pride, but with a kind of patient assessing. She was waiting for me to make a mistake, and he did not believe a mistake was possible. Yet.

My mother’s scrutiny was a burden. But this other way of looking, this besottedness, was just as damning. My mother expected great things and constant improvement. He seemed to believe in a perfection that existed apart from my actual self.

I watched my husband’s slim back as he moved up the mountain. His skin did not brown in the sun, only turned yellow and pink. For this trip, he wore a straw hat with a large brim and a veil of gauze. Ti Me had brought it to him, and they had both laughed about it, a shared joke. His back is muscled, but he is a little man, I thought as he walked ahead of me. It was easy to forget this as we wrestled in bed, as I watched him leave me so many mornings. I thought, I still do not know him, but I think about him at all times, so I suppose it makes no difference if I do or not. It is the same.

“This is where the women come to wash,” he said. Before us was a small pool, the water shallow. “This is where I learned to swim as a boy.”

“You swim?”

“You will, too.”

He stopped before the bank of the pool and began to take off the ridiculous hat, his shirt.

“Emmanuel—”

“The washing day is done. It will be dusk soon. No one will come.”

He rolled his trousers up and waded into the water. Then he turned to me and held out his hands.

“There are two other pools above us. The water for this one comes from a waterfall at the top of the mountain. The pool just above us is about seventy-five feet deep. We will move to that one when you are ready. The best pool is at the top, near the fall. It is maybe a hundred feet deep, but the water is so blue you can almost see to the bottom. We will move to that one together. You’ll see.”

“You are very confident.”

“Of course.”

“If I refuse?”

He smiled. “I will demand it.”

Following his commands seemed an easier way forward to whatever version of myself he imagined. So I put one foot into the water, then another. I stepped very carefully over to him. I could hear the water as it moved around my feet. If I was quiet, I could hear the clap of the waterfall above us. A deeper sound than the one I had listened for in the puddles and barrels of water back home, when I was a girl and believed in Ben Daisy’s lady. Emmanuel held out his hands for me. I put both of mine in his.

And then he threw me down.

The water was not deep enough for me to lose my ground. I went under, onto my knees, but when I raised my head, I broke the surface again.

He was laughing, truly laughing. I thought, I have misjudged him. I thought, I have made a mistake.

“This is how my father taught me,” he kept saying.

I tucked my legs underneath me, sat back in the water. I could feel my skirts filling with the damp, beginning to weigh me down. Emmanuel danced around me, whooping and laughing and splashing. When he got close enough, I held out my hand and pulled his arm, until he was in the water with me.

He rolled happily in the mud of the pool. But if I could have gotten ahold of him, if I had not been scared of the water myself, I would have held him under. If only for a moment, for him to feel what I felt. How could you be bound to someone, for life, to the grave, and fundamentally not feel the same things?

I pushed myself up out of the water, but I felt it still dragging at my skirts, nearly pulling me down again. Emmanuel was still sitting in the water, laughing. I slogged to the shore, one heavy step after another. When I got there, I tried to sit first on the ground, then lean against a tree. I could feel my skirts becoming clammy against my legs. I looked up at the sky. The sun was beginning to set somewhere. You could not see the horizon from this pool, just a pink streak across the sky above us. I was a thousand miles away from my mother because I was too much of a coward to tell her the truth.

In front of me, Emmanuel leaned until he floated on his back. He held his palms out. “This is the first step,” he called. “You must make friends with the water.”

Around us, it was getting darker. In the dimming light, the dirt road we’d taken to the pool glowed against the shadows of the trees, as if it was lit up from below. I could hear the sounds of birds from far away.

“Libertie,