wrote this last night. maybe don't read it near water.
When Bellweather Reservoir dropped low enough, the drowned village returned roof by roof.
People came with cameras. They walked the cracked lakebed in bright shoes, laughing beside chimneys that had not touched air in sixty years. Mara waited until dusk, when the sightseers had gone and the mud began making soft, thoughtful sounds beneath her boots.
Her grandmother's house had stood beside the church. The house was gone, but its blue front door remained upright in the silt.
No walls. No frame. Just the door.
Mara knew the color. Her grandmother had kept a fleck of that paint in a matchbox and sometimes held it under the kitchen light. She never spoke about the evacuation. She only said everyone had left before the valley flooded.
"Everyone who knew how," she once added.
The brass knob turned easily.
Behind the door, stone steps descended into black water. That was impossible. The lake had withdrawn nearly half a mile, and yet the water beyond the threshold was level with Mara's feet, smooth as smoked glass.
Something moved beneath it.
A girl's voice rose from the stairwell.
"May-May?"
Only her grandmother had called her that.
Mara shut the door. Three small knocks answered from the other side.
She walked home without looking back. By midnight, rain was striking the windows, though the forecast was clear. By morning, Bellweather Reservoir was full again. The village had vanished under thirty feet of dark water.
The blue door was waiting at the end of Mara's hallway.
It had replaced the linen closet. Mud dried in fans across the carpet. When she pressed her ear to the wood, she heard water shifting patiently on the other side and a child practicing her name.
Mara has not opened it.
Every morning, however, the wet footprints come a little farther into her bedroom.
Tonight there are none.
Tonight she woke because the mattress was damp beneath her, and someone under the bed whispered, very gently,
"You took long enough."
#darkcorners #fiction #shortstory
Belladusk
"Friend to Crows and Strange Things"