Girls of the Lotus Pond

Content Note: some readers may feel unnerved by the themes of vague body horror.

The afternoon slid over the earth like honey left too long on the stove, thick and slow and smouldering, sugar turning to smoke. It was the kind of heat that made time crawl sideways. Cicadas stitched the air together with silver wire, and the koi pond in Eleanor's backyard exhaled steam like a fever dream, each breath damp with rot and rosewater.

It was July and everything was wet: the grass, their skin, the sun-glossed petals of ivory lilies bloated on the surface like open mouths. Maribel stood waist-deep in it, her dress soaked and translucent, pressing like a second skin to the curve of her spine, the small of her back. Her hair clung to her shoulders like it was afraid to leave.

Eleanor was already in the middle of the pond, half-submerged, the water curling around her hips like a dark tongue. Her fingers trailed the surface, breaking it open with every pass. The koi licked her wrists. Lotuses leaned in to hear her breath. Her eyes were shut, tilted to the sky like a prayer. But her mouth—her mouth was smiling. Too much.

"Don’t step on the lotus," she said dreamily, the sound dragging like a record warped by heat. "It’s bad luck."

Maribel laughed, but it felt wrong in her mouth. She looked down at the lotus beneath her—pink and ivory and veined. Its petals curled with wet hunger. She lifted her foot, slowly.

"You used to say luck wasn’t real," she said, watching Eleanor with something between longing and dread. "You used to say we made our own."

"That was before I died," Eleanor replied, opening her eyes. They were glassy. Not in the poetic sense. Literally glassy—like a porcelain doll left in the attic too long, fogged over with mildew and age. "Things change."

Maribel felt a chill spider up her thighs despite the soup-thick heat. Her heart moved sideways in her chest. They hadn’t said it, not really, not in the last few months since she started seeing Eleanor again. Not in the graveyard, not in the bathtub, not when Eleanor crawled through her window at night with lips like frostbitten lotus petals and hands that smelled like pondwater. But Maribel had known. Had remembered.

Eleanor was dead. She had been dead for a year.

Yet here she was, hair clinging to her collarbones, bones shining wet through her skin like lanterns under rice paper. She was real. She was too real.

"You kept talking to me," Eleanor said softly, taking a step forward. The water welcomed her like an open wound. "You wouldn’t stop. Every night. You curled up with my shirt and whispered into my photograph like a girl in love."

Maribel’s breath hitched. "I wasn’t—"

Eleanor’s smile grew wider. The skin on her cheek cracked. Something clear oozed from the seam. It wasn’t blood. It was syrup. It shimmered. It smelled like lilies.

"Don’t lie," she whispered. "You wanted me back. You said you’d give anything."

The pond rippled. Maribel stumbled. The koi circled tighter now, biting the water with soft, fleshy mouths. Maribel took a step back. The lilies shifted. They weren’t flowers anymore. Not entirely. Their petals grew lips. Their centers blinked open like pupils. One of them spat a pearl at her feet that dissolved into a tooth.

"Are you real?" she asked, but her voice was paper-thin. Like she was asking the pond. Like she was asking herself.

Eleanor giggled, a sound sticky with sugar and decay. "You tell me. You’re the one who brought me back."

And then the flesh peeled. It began with her cheek, sloughing off like old paint, revealing a slick, dark muscle underneath that pulsed once, twice, then split. Her arm followed. Skin slipped down her shoulder like fine silk, revealing bone laced prettily with vines, delicate lotuses growing from her ribs. Her chest opened like a book of pressed flowers. Her heart beat in the center, pulpy and raw, wrapped in roots.

"I missed you," Maribel whispered, and she did. God, she did. She missed the way Eleanor had tasted like salt and nectarines. She missed her biting sarcasm. Her too-long stares. The night they kissed in the closet and laughed like it hadn’t ruined them.

Eleanor reached for her, fingers dripping flesh, nails cracked open like eggshells. Maribel let her. Their hands met and the lilies screamed. Not loud—no sound at all, actually. But Maribel felt it in her bones, the way a tree feels the saw. The way a tooth feels the rot.

The pond convulsed.

Water surged up around them, twisting in spirals. The sky turned ochre then the color of bruises. Maribel looked down and saw her reflection bend sideways. Her face stretched. Her mouth grinned without her. Her eyes bled.

"We could live here," Eleanor said, voice slurring now, like it came from three mouths at once. "We could curl up inside the pond like embryos. Stay warm. Stay soft."

Maribel opened her mouth to scream and inhaled a lotus. It crawled down her throat and its petals opened in her lungs. She choked, coughed, gagged. Water poured from her eyes. Eleanor cradled her, fingers breaking off at the knuckle.

"It’s better this way," Eleanor cooed. "You don’t have to be alone. You don’t have to remember what it was like without me."

Maribel coughed up flowers and they splattered across the water, blooming on contact. Each one bore a memory: the first time they touched thighs under the table, the sleepover where Eleanor painted hearts on her knees, the morning she learned Eleanor was dead and kissed her pillow until her lips cracked.

The pond devoured it all.

Eleanor leaned close, breath wet and smelling of rotting lily. "Say it. Say you want me. Say you’ll stay."

Maribel cried. The pond took her tears and turned them into pearls. The lilies ate them with glee.

"Say it."

"I want you," Maribel whispered. "I want you so bad it feels like thorns in my chest."

Eleanor kissed her. Their teeth clicked. Something passed between their mouths—a petal or a prayer. It didn’t matter.

Maribel sank and the pond welcomed her.

Her skin split open. Not blood. Roots. Tiny white filaments stretching from her veins. Her hair grew thickly into algae. Her bones curled into spirals. Koi swam through the cage of her ribs, caressing her heart.

Eleanor laughed, and her mouth tore open into a smile too wide, stretching from chin to temple. It was no longer a girl’s face. It was a maw. It was hunger. It was Maribel’s hunger.

They twisted together in the pond like eels. Like lovers. Like deities being born wrong.

Time melted and space wept. The sky pulsed.

The water towered above them like cathedral walls, rippling with murals of their past lives. Each lily became an altar. Each lotus opened its mouth and chanted memories, curling them into ribbons of sound that slithered through the water like living incense. One of them showed Maribel’s birth. The day they met as juniors in high-school, four years prior. Another, Eleanor’s coffin being lowered into the earth, roots reaching up to pull her back into its depth.

Their bodies warped in the water. Maribel grew another heart. Eleanor grew gills. Their skin stitched together in places, slick and sinewy. The koi began to fuse, overlapping into bloated beasts with a dozen eyes and mouths that sang only her name.

The water moaned with their weight. It thickened to sap. They were no longer swimming but sinking in syrup, in time, in memory.

And then—

A crack.

The air split.

Light poured in, and it wasn’t light at all. It was memory. It was the weight of every whispered wish. It was Eleanor, rotting in her grave with a crystal on her chest. It was Maribel, alone on her bedroom floor, throat raw from saying I miss you into the dark.

The lilies tilted their heads in unison and they began to sing. The sound was unbearable. Beautiful. Like a throat opening into fire. Like longing made flesh. The lotuses joined, their mouths stretching wide, teeth blooming from soft petals. They sang of grief. Of love. Of girls who crawled back into each other because the world outside was too sharp.

Eleanor reached for Maribel one last time and Maribel let her. Their hands touched while their skin peeled back; inside was nothing but more lily scented pond water.

The sky cracked open and the waterlilies sang—

Everything went still.