The sun had bleached everything down to bone. Roads, grass, the skin on my knuckles, everything brittle, ready to split. Drought. Month after month. The air had the texture of sandpaper. Breathing felt like a punishment.
Two hundred and forty-eight days without rain. The weatherman had stopped lying about a “chance of showers.” My town, Briar Creek—if it ever had a soul—had long since coughed it up and buried it under strip malls, busted neon, and the sour stink of hot dust and old oil.
The land wasn’t dead. That would’ve been cleaner. It was dying, slowly and publicly, like it was bleeding out. Trees gave up first, the lawns, then pets—first lost, then found. Dehydrated, slack, twitching.
I lived in a single-wide on cinder blocks with a busted AC and duct tape over the bedroom window. Three cats I never named came and went as they pleased. I shared food, and in return, they didn’t leave. That was about as good as love got in Briar Creek.

​

My name was Rowan. A neutral name, finally. Not the one I was born with. I found it when I was seventeen, bleeding and high behind a Circle K, reading Wikipedia on my cracked phone. I’d typed in “tree names that sound like people.” Rowan was on the list. I liked that it wasn’t just a tree: it was protection. Old folklore said if you carried a twig of it, witches couldn’t touch you. It fit better. My old name made my stomach knot. Every time someone said it, it felt like someone else’s skin pulled tight over mine.
But names don’t mean much here unless you're dead or famous. People still called me “sweetheart” or “young lady” if they were kind, and worse if they weren’t. They looked at my chest and thought they knew me. They looked at my silence and mistook it for agreement. So I got quiet. Quieter. I let myself shrink.
My reflection became something to flinch from, not fix. Some days, I couldn’t even say “I” out loud without feeling like a liar.
That summer, something shifted. Not outside. Inside.

​

I started dreaming about the culvert again.
The drainage ditch. The tunnel. That gaping mouth of concrete behind the old Catholic school, long abandoned and fenced off like a crime scene. When I was a kid—before everything split—I used to sit inside it, hunched and barefoot, surrounded by broken bottles. I was small and strange and obsessed with the idea that somewhere, something was listening.
So I made a god.
Their name was Murk.
Not a god you’d find in stained glass or Latin hymns. Murk didn’t promise salvation. They didn’t demand I be better. They were a god of rot and runoff, of things forgotten, of mold and shadow and still water with teeth. I gave them candy wrappers and cicada shells, chicken bones, and glitter glue. In return, I felt seen. Not judged. Witnessed. Murk didn’t ask me to be anything but alive.
And then I left them. Puberty hit like a hammer wrapped in silk. Soft at first, then devastating. My chest bloomed like bruises. My hips widened. My voice betrayed me. Teachers said I was becoming a woman. Strangers stared longer, and God, did they stare. And I, who had once danced barefoot in the tunnel, hollering prayers to a gutter god, folded.
I left Murk behind and told myself they were a fantasy. I tried church for a while. I tried smiling. I tried dressing as people expected. I felt like I was putting on someone else's funeral clothes.
But that summer of cracked pavement and static heat, I started hearing things. Water where there was none. Gurgling in the pipes when I brushed my teeth. A low thrum behind the walls. A presence. I started talking to the drains again and to the mold in the corners. To the mirror, when I could stand it.
“I know you’re there,” I said once, half-laughing, toothpaste foaming in my mouth.
And then, one night, the sink backed up for no reason. No reason except Murk.
The dreams came after that. Wet tunnels. Glowing eyes. Something vast just beyond reach. I’d wake up shaking, skin damp, mouth full of the taste of metal and dirt.
I took it as a call, and not a kind one, not a safe one—but real.
So I went back.

​

It was July, and 108 degrees in the shade. Everything smelled like hot pennies and despair. I climbed the rusted fence behind the old school, scratched open my palm on the wire, and bled a little on the weeds. That felt right. An offering. And there it was: the ditch. Still open. Still waiting. The tunnel yawned wide before me—same mossy walls, same graffiti, now older, faded, like bruises healing badly. The air inside was thick. Damp. I could barely see a foot in, but my body remembered.
I crawled in.
The deeper I went, the more the world faded. The sun became a smear behind me. The sounds outside disappeared. All I could hear was my breath, the scrape of my palms, and the occasional drip from somewhere ahead.
And then, I sat.
Cross-legged in the damp dark. Backpack beside me. I lit a small candle I’d brought, just a tea light, and cupped it like a fragile secret.
“Murk,” I said. “It’s Rowan.” That name still felt new in my mouth. “I want to confess something.”
The walls pulsed like lungs.
“I stopped believing you were real. I said you were just a kid thing. I buried you with everything else I loved when I was too scared to be weird, or wrong, or too much. I thought if I stopped needing anything, I’d stop hurting.”
Silence.
“I wanted to stop existing. Not die. Just stop being a problem.”
Then, I cried. The kind of crying that happens behind locked doors. Chest-heaving, ugly, mucus-wet sobbing that claws its way out. My candle flickered with each breath.

​

The air thickened, and yet somehow, grew cooler. My skin pricked. Something moved ahead of me: not light, not shadow, a motion. And then, Murk.
They unfolded out of the damp like rising mold, slender and too tall. Their skin shimmered like oil on asphalt. They had no fixed face; it sort of flickered—My father’s scowl, my child-self, static, teeth, eyes that held depth, not light.
“You returned,” they said, with a voice like water in an old pipe.
“I didn’t know where else to go.”
“You came to confess,” they said, crouching beside me, their knees popping like branches.
“I thought I’d killed you.”
“You only drowned me. Not the same thing.”
The tunnel pulsed around us. The water started to rise, first ankle-deep, then higher.
“I prayed for rain,” I said. “And then I got mad when it didn’t come.”
“You wanted cleansing,” Murk said. “But I am not that kind of god.”
“I wanted release—”
“No,” they said. “You wanted to be witnessed. And you were.”
Outside, thunder rolled like a threat.
“You will never be easy, but you were not meant to be easy. You were meant to be true,” they said. “You are a bridge. A between. Body as question. Name as spell. You are sacred because you do not simplify.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My throat had closed up. I felt like a cathedral with broken windows, light pouring in through the cracks.

​

Then, the rain came.
It didn’t fall gently. It slammed. A roar. A rupture. A baptism.
The roof of the school groaned under it. Water poured into the ditch, surging around us, cold and sharp.
I laughed, loud and raw, arms wide. Murk was radiant in it. Their body half-submerged, their face a blur of everything I had ever been and everything I had tried to erase.
“You are not forgiven,” they said.
“I didn’t ask,” I replied.
“Good.” Murk grinned. “Then take what’s yours.” And they pressed a hand to my chest—to the place I hated most—and I let them.

​

When I crawled out, drenched and filthy, the rain was still falling. People were in the streets crying, shouting, and laughing. A man knelt in a puddle while two teens danced on a car roof. I saw a dog roll in the mud as if it were gold.
I was waterlogged, barefoot, with hair dripping like kelp. No one looked at me, but I felt seen.
Not by them, by me, and by the god I created when I was too young to know what survival meant—but old enough to need it.