Katherine hangs suspended, star-shaped and weightless on the surface of the water, gently baking in the benevolent sun. The lapping tide doesn’t seem to hold her as much as buoy her along, aloft. This lake has no interest in possessing her, and even if she tried to push to the bottom and nuzzle her bones into the silt, the antigravity powers of this concentrated saltwater would propel her upwards, forcing her back to gulp at the air. Don’t swallow any, she remembers. Solid advice given in several languages to the tourists as they disembarked, accentuated by the tour guide’s fingers-down-the-throat-retching gesture. 
The boat’s engine had rattled like a tired mechanical lung. They’d been given a shot of clear, sharp liquor and a meat filled roll to fortify themselves despite the early hour. This oddly nourishing combo inside her, Katherine sat on the wooden seats and smirked while watching the teenage boys’ eyes pop out on stalks as a group of French girls stripped to their swimsuits and reclined on the deck. 
Katherine knows she should’ve gone on a more frugal trip, been more sensible. Not like this was her usual lifestyle. But even as she thinks these thoughts, they seem unreal, rote learned. The word trip, too, rings false - this is her life now, more or less, til she figures out where she lands. Or the money runs out. 
She knows some previous version of her made this decision, a lifetime ago. Weeks, was it? Time falls away in the undulating lake. That version of her may as well be a character in a book or on screen. She sees herself snatching handfuls of unfamiliar currency from a sternly bleeping ATM. She can’t even visualise the name on the bank card if she tries, the embossed mechanical letters appearing as disconnected dots and loops.
The water glugs in and out of Katherine’s ears with a bassy slosh. In between, slices of shore sounds leak in, voices risen and giddy, the guddle of wet pebbles under feet. Through these gaps, she hears a thick male voice, out of context, addressing her. It is calling to her alone but speaking a name she doesn’t recognise, with demands she cannot comprehend. The voice is subsumed in the soft whisper of the waves as quickly as it appears, the water drowning it out with confident ease. She almost raises her head to look. But no, don’t be silly, she tells herself. It’s not really for her. Whoever it is, whatever - it’s not calling for her. 
It had cropped up a few times over the last few weeks - sometimes a voice, sometimes a figure out the corner of her eye. Every time, she’d freeze - her thinking brain mechanically processing the potential threat, her nervous system already ten steps down the road of panic and distress. The Thing, she called it. That shape or sound always on the periphery.  It had another name, but that’s lost now, slipped through a crack in her memory. She’s put some distance between herself and The Thing, and it’s finally fading, its detail diminishing. Each time, The Thing becomes just another tone or trick of the light, its timbre and shape disconnected from anything malicious or human. They say every time you remember something, you’re just remembering the last time you remembered it. The way her brain melts solid, real experience into muddy obscurity comforts Katherine. She wonders what the memory of this moment will be, right now, here in this lake, or if this is it already, her brain and body fated never to be in the moment but always experiencing it at a distance. 
Shit. Her stillness is disrupted by the thought of her bag discarded on the shore. Not just her bag, but her money, clothes, shoes, apartment key. A momentary panic turns the water around her cold. But everyone here is just like me, out for the day, she tells herself. No one cares, but in the nicest way possible. Katherine’s thinking brain has always been the slowest part of her. She’s been told that enough to believe it, at least. Her flighty or freezy parts are limber through plenty practice. 
She scolds herself. Stupid. Your fault if they get nicked. These habits die hard, these judging words that rise up in her head as naturally as breath. The Thing again. But it’s become duller, a grainy recording of what they once were. Katherine imagines The Thing’s words trickling out her ears, their power dissipating in the ripples of the lake as she hears them for the last time. The sun drapes a blanket of heat across her face and torso, her limbs drooping beneath the surface.
A series of images throb across Katherine’s mind as she lies prone on the surface of the water, unsure of their origin or accuracy. She remembers them like childhood television programmes, usually inaccessible but intrinsically part of her, strange and abstract and out of place. The zip on a stuffed suitcase. Two rings in a bowl. Car keys being dropped through a drain cover, plopping satisfyingly into the sludge below. Her legs crossed on the front seat of a bus, air whipping around them. She realises this last image is surely only from this morning, yesterday at a push. She tries to pinpoint which day it is right now and sees calendars jumble and shuffle, revealing their arbitrary nature. 
Katherine flips onto her front and swims further into the lake. It takes no effort at all to get to what she calculates is the centre, the deepest point. Endless azure extends above and below. Most of the other swimmers have stayed at the periphery, splashing, laughing, tossing inflatable balls to each other. If she wasn’t alone, maybe she would have too. The Thing intrudes to tell her she is too far out, but it’s automated and unconvincing, and she has no trouble casting its message aside and treading water here, her circling hands making the only disturbances in the surface. She watches the ripples fan out and collide until they are nothing, energy translated into temporary form, with her as the centre. They say energy can’t be destroyed, only change into a different form. They say a lot of things though. She remembers a promise she made to herself, exactly when she can’t be sure - it’s getting slippery, or was it always so? - that she’d do less thinking and more doing, someday. For thinking, read worrying. Thoughts are energy, though. Worries, too. They must be. Where do they go? What do they get turned into? Did they all get stored up inside her, wound tight, then whip loose and propel her to here, now, her thoughts gradually emptying out of her in a island salt lake? These questions recede in immediate importance to the flat clang of a cowbell from the shore, summoning the tourists back to the boat. 
Katherine toys with the idea of just staying here, starshaped again, until the last possible moment. They wouldn’t go without her, they’d do a headcount. Surely. Or maybe it would just be her stupid luck. Sigh. There she goes again. She can’t tell which words are her inner monologue or The Thing’s residue - that perpetually irritated yet cloying sound that wormed its way in through repetition and insistence. She knows the face it used to issue from, or at least she thinks she does. If she saw it again she’d remember. For now, and in what she thinks are memories, it appears as a malformed shadow, a slow clenching orifice at its centre, puffing out inconsequential air. 
Katherine gives into the pressure of the tour guide’s bell and swims towards the shore. In between the blur of each stroke she sees families towelling themselves down, mothers urgently hauling children into clothes which bunch around their still-damp limbs. She closes her eyes and pushes on, the water seeming to open up in front of her and help her along, barely any resistance from the low waves. She’ll be the last one to the boat, but she’ll make it. Katherine steps across the pebbles to her bag, all present and intact, deciding to throw her shawl around her shoulders and let herself air dry on the short walk back, looking forward to an hour or so of daydreaming on the boat before she decides what to do next. 
Always in your head. In amongst The Thing’s faint mushy grumble, these words stick out plain and clear. They are stripped from context, but she understands the hot faced shame they attempt to stir up. It lingers in her muscle memory, as does the sensation of a face pressed right up against hers, the spray of spittle on her cheek, the crack of bone and the flash of pain. All of these things, she hoped, were receding. Katherine knows that every time they flit across her mind it takes some effort to swat them away, to keep the specifics from burrowing into her waking thoughts. Less and less effort each day, she reminds herself. 
Her sunglasses clasped on her face, Katherine zones out to the secret rhythms of the water as the boat hits its stride. She’s doing better, she knows that. Losing the point of reference, the baseline, the murk of some obscure hurt - she chalks these up as successes, necessary processes of cleansing and forgetting on the way to...something else, some future destination that is already evolving and aligning. 
And being in her head, so what? What’s that meant to mean anyway? Who is ever outside their head? She shifts in her seat, the sea air whipping her hair around her. She’s barely spoken to a soul these last few weeks, and she’s never been less - what would you call it? - absent, dreamy, whatever. But all these things, she realises, were imposed on her. Had she avoided the world around her for however many years? Had it been kept from her? She laughs a little out loud, the absurdity of getting worked up in a conversation with herself, justifying herself. At the end of things as they were, a dark cloak seemed to envelop her, heavier than ever, closing down thought and dreams and choices. But even these details are muddy now, uncertain, like they have melted into the range of infinite possibilities that could have transpired, these settled occurrences now disordered and in flux. All that she is left with are the sensations deeply burned into her body, a type of psychic scarring, she thinks, as the dancing light on the Adriatic Sea works some wonders on the rest of her. 
She thumbs through her purse, counting out the remaining notes. It looks like plenty, at least for now. After that - who knows? An acid twinge rises from her stomach to her throat. Always the same. A bloody daydreamer. She burps, sour alcohol taste filling her mouth, and as she exhales these insults drift off like vapour, dispersed among the air, already forgotten. The last few remaining, she thinks. Her head feels light and ready to be filled with different sounds, and she dreams of a chorus of rapturous whooping to take the place of all the niggling words that were held there for so long. 
As she clasps the purse shut, Katherine notices a trickle of blood running down her forearm. A small nick, without pain, on the back of her wrist has spouted a glossy trail which is still fresh. Instinctively, she licks the wound, drawing her tongue along her arm, following the red line. Her teeth press down on the flesh and she closes her eyes against the shimmering light. Her arm tastes salty, the flesh tender and unknowable yet totally her own, and as these familiar impressions take root within her, they merge and multiply into new forms of touch and taste, flaring up and out in every direction at once, endless and new.

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Euan Currie is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has published work with Goodnight Press and Bandit Fiction as well as performing work at the intersection of sound and text for many years.