Sophie Mackintosh

"A gripping, sinister fable!"--Margaret Atwood, via Twitter LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER PRIZE "Ingenious and incendiary."--THE NEW YORKER A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2019 BY VOGUE, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, WASHINGTON POST, HUFFINGTON POST, VULTURE, LITHUB, REFINERY29 and more The Handmaid's Tale meets The Virgin Suicides in this dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters: Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has laid the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or, viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cultlike rituals and therapies they endure fortify them against the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. When their father, the only man they have ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two strange men and a boy wash ashore. Over the span of one blisteringly hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men? A haunting, riveting debut about our capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

The Water Cure

Abigail Mills

My feelings are limping, wretched things. Underwater., staring at the stained tiles, I scream as loudly as I can. The water kills the e Opening my eyes, I turn on to my back and watch the sun throuel. sound. the water, a rippling orb of light. It is at times like these that I, can imagine holding myself down until the water floods my lungs, that I realize it wouldn't even be so hard. The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all

Strong feelings weaken you, open up your body like a wound. It takes we have learned how to dampen them down, how to practie vigilance and regular therapies to hold them at bay. Over the years as diagl out the bad feel to lick the skin of my f pain go. release emotion under strict conditions only, how to own our pain can cough it into muslin, trap it as bubbles under the water. let it from my very blood.

We were not supposed to watch. UIe The women drank the salt water first, their faces pained. Than threw up repeatedly into the buckets. Their bodies convulsed They lay on the floor but Mother helped them up, insistent. They rinsed their mouths, spat. Then they drank from the second row, glas after glass of our good and pure water, the water that came from our taps like a miracle, the water that the sprinklers cast out in the early dusk like a veil across the garden. The water we ourselves drank by the pint first thing every morning, Mother watching our throats as we swallowed. The women took it into themselves. It was a start. The water flamed their cells and blood. Soon the glasses were all empty.

You see?' he would tell us as we surrounded the fallen sister, as we flicked water against skin. 'You see how quickly you'd die out there?"

We unloaded the boat as he dragged his body upstairs to soak in the tub, to let the scum of the outside world fall away. By the time he came back down for dinner he was a little livelier

Once I was caughtopening one of the magazines. […] Though I didn't make it past the second page I was still required to wear latex gloves for the rest of that week in case I contaminated anyone, and I was banned from dinner for the rest of the week too. My sisters brought me discs of sweatily buttered bread and dry fish that they had hidden in their laps. Grace accompanied her offerings with strict words about how stupid I was; Sky brought hers with sincere guilt about raising the alarm. I forgave her easily because the scream was proof of concern, of love, the same way she would have screamed had a viper been raising its head, fangs bared towards my outstretched hand. 

Water washes the drawings away. Takes away trauma/painful memories. 

We stayed there until the tide came up and reached the ashes, turned them into sludge.

Crying lays you low and vulnerable, racks your body. If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort. It has absorbed our pain and is dangerous to let loose

“I'm giving him back to you”, I tell the sea. There is no answer as I lower my arms into the water up to the elbow. The small parcel falls down through the water. Burial at Sea. The only honourable option.

I turn away and stare at the sea, trying to find the point where I let the baby go. The supple water is forever changing. It's almost like it never happened, which gives me hope that one day it will be like it never happened.

The Water Cure quotes

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