Mud Lungs by Jenna Grieve
The pond cradles them in its mouth like teeth. The statues. Cracked and shattered.
They’re reskinned and restitched with moss and algae. Pond scum buries into the grooves of their intricate braids, creases inside their wistful smiles. She doesn’t know how ancient they are. She’s been here only once before, the night her Uncle stole her from her bed, his truck gargling her, splinters of sunrise in the cracked back window, the spinal knot of mountain roads. He looked over his shoulder, told her it was important to stay awake so her lungs could learn to be a home for the mountain air.
Her Uncle made everyone in the family apocalypse “grab bags” for Christmas that year. They all laughed at the dehydrated meal sachets, multitools, flares. He disappeared sometime before the following Christmas—nobody was sure exactly when, as he’d been the sort of person to only appear during winter.
The underbrush, with its jaw unhinged to swallow the bench and her legs with it, grows full and sleepy at sunset, and wilts away. The statues don’t watch; they are shy, cast demure gazes down to the lilypads, their great flowers like suns. Some have only half a skull, or their limbs have been ripped away. Some lie sideways, their ears to the mud, one eye below the water. They’re arranged like a séance. She thought it when her Uncle’s shadow wrapped up her own, and she still thinks it now she is alone. Any exhaled ripple of water could bite through their connection to mysteries, an old search for living or ghostly heartbeats.
She presses a palm to her own. The mountain air has sucked her lungs rigid around her heart and the organ flails and gasps.
There are answers she wants, but knows she’ll never get. If the end of the world has breath along with its hunger. If it can be cauterised. What would it take to uncrown it? She’s always had the sense the statues were only slumbering. She places the apocalypse backpack around the shoulders of one, the one who stands tallest out the water, unashamed of her bare breasts, one mossy around the nipple, and one partly crumbled away. She looks into the distance, her eyebrows narrowed, lips a strict, straight line. Her hair is knotted back, battle ready. This statue will cope with this unnerving world better than her. She wades into the water and algae wraps around her waist, fervent, hungry. For how long will she need to stand still before the mud swallows her hips, before the moss tastes her skin? She places herself at the centre of the group of statues, and closes her eyes.
Jenna Grieve is a fiction writer from Scotland. Her stories have been published in Bandit Fiction, Blood Orange Review, Luna Station Quarterly, Hare’s Paw, and elsewhere. Recently her writing has been interrupted by two adorable kittens playing on her keyboard.