1st Place - Emilie Dawson-Woman By the Water

My mother thinks I come to the water every morning to study the swans. She bought me a new drawing pad and charcoals, I have drawn them once or twice so that there is evidence of how I spent my days when she inevitably asks. She coos over their obvious beauty and the delicate lilies floating on the water. The July weather has been just cool enough to explain why I might spend hours on my blanket by the water.

I watch the children’s attempts to befriend the swans. The littlest ones are drawn in by the gangly long necks and wide feathered bodies. They marvel at the startling orange and offset black of the beak. They attempt to lure them in with bits of their meal, but someone nearby always pulls them back before damage can be done. That kind of headlong desire without thought of consequence stuns me. I know I once possessed it, same as them, but it feels like it has been winnowed down with every hand that rested on my shoulder. Every woman who made me wary of men but combed my hair and dressed me to entice one. All the years I spent away at school, they were meant to shape me into someone. I watch the towheaded children by the water and think they are already the purest version of a human.

I don’t know if you remember me. The first day I came to the park, you looked at me longer than a passing glance, but you made no gesture of acknowledgment. Maybe you recognized me by name when you saw the paper last week. I didn’t want the announcement to be so large, but my intended’s family has an image to uphold. Nearly half the page above the fold in the society pages, my father preened like a peacock all day. It has been made clear that I am expected to enhance that image. The image of idyllic familial bliss, of proud parents raising good children and coupling them off together to conquer the world, however small of a world that may be.

I witness you in another version of that pastoral tableau. Although just outside the photo frame, you’re integral to the happy family. You’re expected to entertain and care for the children who aren’t your own. You’re expected to live in their house and wear their simple uniform and shun personal desires like the Sisters who don similarly black and white uniforms of servitude.

Do you enjoy it? Maybe the family is kind and the children are darling and you truly do enjoy your daily care of them. Maybe not. I’m sorry if this was your only choice. Although, your smile does seem genuine. I pray I am not speaking out of turn when I assess your happiness, or assume the lack thereof. Maybe you have found it and I am too deeply entrenched in the misery of my own gilded cage to imagine someone else’s contentment.

But I have been studying closely, I’m too far into these pages to restrain myself now. Twice I saw your perfect posture wilt. Twice, in my many hours on the hill, I’ve seen your eyes wander across the water, your mask slipping, and the air seeming to leave your person. When the mothers return to bring their children home and you are left without the busyness of a dozen little bodies to steal your focus and energy. Only twice have I seen it because my own responsibilities call me to pack up my blanket and return to my parent’s house, to attend fittings and appointments, to plan floral arrangements for an event that makes me feel as if the walls are shrinking around me every morning when I wake.

I do not wish to marry him. God, I haven’t told anyone that. I do not wish to marry him.

But I will have nothing if I do not. I’m an accomplished girl, but what good is needle point or speaking French to put money in my pocket. When I marry him I will have money, a house to run, a name that opens doors of opportunity. When I marry him I fear I will have nothing left in my heart like the romance of a young girl’s imagination.

My mother thinks I come to the water for the swans, but she’s wrong.

I do go there for the beauty. I study a graceful creature by the water and I stay a safe distance away, afraid in a similar way that most are of the swan. Afraid of dangerous unknowns when foreign creatures interact. But lately, I’ve allowed myself to imagine what would happen if I did.

This may be the boldest thing I’ve ever done, but I am still in a house that feels like home, and that has made me brave. Will you write me back and tell me what you thought of those times I saw you unmasked? Will you see me once before the month is over?

-G

I have unfolded your letter countless times since I found it in my basket. I have read it, and reread it, and certainly don’t need to unfold it anymore because I can see it perfectly when I close my eyes. Your letter feels like the ribbon bookmark on my bible, dividing the Old Testament and the Gospels. I had a life before the letter, but it is so completely colored by what you wrote to me that I cannot remember enough of it to answer your questions. I had other choices, worse choices. Being a governess and taking care of vulnerable ones is easy enough to stomach again, and again, and again.

When I find myself feeling the way you described, wistful, restless, I turn to other people’s lives to comfort me. I turn to fiction and adventure. Occasionally I turn to school books to sip the nostalgia of my youth while preparing for the additional lessons I am expected to teach. Rarely do I turn to true stories. I know many things that are true that feel like weights around my ankles, keeping me forever bound to the earth. I prefer to expand myself with farfetched possibilities.

I’ve read the classics. Tales of heroes and epic journeys. Travels to distant worlds and victory over terrifying enemies. Those acts of bravery were rooted in ego, serving themselves and their legacies. Those acts of bravery pale in comparison to the words you penned to me. The blinding of a sleeping giant with a fiery branch seems farcical compared to your clandestine journey with the letter from your safety on the hill to my world by the shore. I imagine your heart beating erratically as the paper left your fingertips, the same way mine did when I unsealed it to see handwriting that was once so familiar to me. You ask if I remember you. I could never forget my first friend. Even if we only spent one year in each other’s company, sharing slates and primary readers, I remember your gentle smile and kind words. I remember how you defended me against those horrible girls who insulted my lack of family and my poverty.

I did see the announcement in the paper. I read it over my lady’s shoulder while I served her breakfast. I tucked it in my apron when I cleared the table. I folded it between the pages of a book by my bed so that I am still alone during the day, so I am unencumbered to do my chores and work like I have every day since I moved into this house. But when the house is quiet, when my hair is pinned under my bonnet, when mine is the only candle that burns in the window, maybe on the whole street, I can lift the pages and see your face.

If my words are illegible it is because I have had less experience with bravery. I am emboldened by your words and feel it is an appropriate action to return the sentiments that you professed. Please believe, I don’t return them out of politeness. I return them because they are true. I return them because by this pen in my nearly dark room I can imagine a circle of light just large enough to encompass the both of us. I can imagine the lock on my door would hold fast to protect us not just from the outside world, but maybe even the passage of time. I can imagine that the photo of you hanging from the pages of my book is of only you, and the man still tucked between the pages is at your side by happenstance and not by any will of your own. I can imagine that you sat for that photo, that you dressed in organza and pearls and carefully brushed color across your lips and cheek, with one person in mind. I can imagine that you paid the photographer with money from your pocketbook, maybe from a job that brought you pride, and that you sent the print in the mail directly to my letterbox. That you didn’t care if your parents or the postman or the housekeeper saw my name so close to yours on the front of an envelope. I can imagine all of these things in the dark because the rest of the world has retired, and the sky is so vast that I think there must be ways to live a whole life.

The times you mention, when you see my confidence falter, these are the thoughts that interrupt the life I have been afforded. I will see you, if we can. I had a very routine life until you wrote to me…please write me again with instructions for adventure. I will salvage every scrap of bravery I can find until then.

-M

I have been smiling since I saw the edge of your letter peeking between pages of the newspaper on my blanket. My mother’s joy is the only one that comes close to my own. Her joy springs from believing I have finally found happiness in my circumstances, in my fast approaching future. She needn’t know that the future that holds my happiness will come much sooner than the date we sent out in the mail.

I am careful with your letter. It lives in the safety of my room, under a loose board at the bottom of my desk. I don’t dare leave it where someone in my house can find it, but I cannot bear to watch your words burn. The comfort of my bedroom has been diminished somehow knowing that soon I will be expected to share that sacred space with another, one with whom I am not sure I will ever feel wholly comfortable. One who I surely will not want to write in candlelight. I haven’t slept properly in weeks. Now when I don’t sleep it’s for a new reason: hope. I watch my candle dancing in the window, the only light still burning on my street besides the gas lamps outside. I imagine yours streets away, burning to match mine, ready to illuminate the path between us.

The circle of light you described has not been far from my mind. I think we can create a place like that. There is a boat house on the far shore of the lake. My betrothed has a skiff there and I have grown comfortable manning it. We can go out onto the water and talk about the decade or so since we knew each other. The fireflies will be out in force and we can bring our candles to light the rest of the way.

Meet me there at midnight, the evening after next.

-G

Just as your first letter made me think of the Bible, this letter makes me think of all the books that are ruined for me. Tales of adventure and romance, stories that allowed me to experience it all secondhand. Now I have experienced it in the violent force of reality, and I am forever changed.

On the days you cannot come to the water, I still feel you there. Not just up on the hill, but out on the water. I can see your hand pouring a bottle of wine into our jam jars. I can feel it next to mine on the bench, close enough for me to feel the heat of it cut through the night air. I can hear your whispered words and laughter floating across the water.

I feel as though my world has focused down to a pinpoint, to the small hours of the evening we can steal away in the short time before your name and address change forever.

Whatever time you can give me before your wedding day, I will gratefully accept. Leave your reply in the boathouse.

Yours,

Mine. You don’t know what that means to me. To have someone for my own, someone to whom I belong equally. I don’t want to claim any other because that claim would be false. You speak of reality and I admit I am unfamiliar with what is reality and what is a dream now.

I know the logic of it all, that is what propelled me to this place, a week away from promises before God and so many witnesses. But if you can be real, then the reality I was resigned to begins to crumble before me.

What if we could be like the heroes from our stories? What if we could go out into the world to seek our fortune and pass its tests? Is this not one of the tests now?

My hand shakes as I write this. Whatever bravery I had for myself now encompasses you, and I would never dare to bring you harm or shame. But… I cannot help wanting more. I cannot help believing there is someplace away from here where we could have it.

Meet me again tonight. Please.

Devotedly,

I waited for you, but I know your mother will not be cavalier with your time so close to the wedding day. I’m sorry that you have to lie to her, but you said she would prize your happiness above all else, and you looked so earnest it pained me.

I would like to deliver your happiness. It is inextricably tied to my own.

I’ve gathered supplies and can nick a horse for our transport. My housekeeper has given me the name of her cousin in the next state. We can find work and lodging through her and when the dust has settled, we can send word to your family.

If this is a dream, if you change your mind…I’ll look for your letter. If this is real, then the hours until we are together tick on.

Eternally,

The hours are truly dwindling, but my mind is clear. I leave this letter in the pre-dawn light, when I was finally able to sneak away in a house full of people. I promise to be here tonight.

Be careful! My leaving without more than a letter is the gravest discourtesy, but it isn’t a crime. I trust your judgment to get us out of here. I trust your judgment to keep us safe.

I pray we never need to write each other again.

Only Yours,

Mother,

I cannot apologize enough for the shame I may have brought to our house. But I need you to know that it was a matter of life or death for me. And I am truly alive.

All My Love,

GVCAOctober 25, 2024