People's Choice Award: The Open Well

By Thom Conroy

EXCERPT:

     The well opened a rift. For two decades now, I thought I was healed. I kept nothing secret, attended the recommended counselling, wrote of the attack in my journal and read the horrible thing out loud to anyone who would listen. Then last autumn I came out of Mason Bole's back door and saw my seven-year old daughter Rita crouched in the high grass. My first thought was that she had discovered some rural treasure, the ochre plate of a great toadstool or a goat's bleached jaw. In the next moment I saw the darkness of the open well, its sudden verticality beside her knee, and I was returned to what happened eighteen years before.

     'Mum, let go!' Rita said. I had crept up silently, afraid I would spook her, and when I caught hold it was a violent clutch.

     She said, 'You're squeezing me.'

     My chest was vibrating with fear. I pulled Rita down in the grass beside me and held her wrists. Later, Mason apologised. Said he had removed the cover from the well but he thought he had put it back. For her part, Rita was offended that I had put an end to her gazing into the darkness of the well. 'Purple dark,' she described it later.

     'Jesus, Mason, ' I said. I could not draw a proper breath. 'You thought you put the cover on?'

     Mason, at that time only my acquaintance, drew me to him. He had no right, and I resisted, but he is a strong man, one whose muscles vie for position when he bends or lifts his hands above his head. On that day in autumn with Rita in the upstairs toilet, Mason held me to him. He told me it would be all right. His hands closed behind me. My head swam.

     In Mason's arms I was returned to the empty lot where Jeffrey attacked me. This lot was the only clearing in a pine forest up from the beach. A house had rotted where it stood, you could see the outlines of its rooms in crabgrass. A footpath to nowhere was bordered by daffodils. Behind the outline of the house was a shed. In Mason's arms, I heard my footsteps passing over the broken glass of the lot. Saw the shed's half opened door. I heard the wind as it was on that day, as I hear it tonight, though perhaps it was not as fierce then as now. In Mason's arms I often feel panic spiked with comfort, as if, since the day Rita stood next to that open well, Mason has become a version both of my terror and its relief. What a hopeless position for anyone. It's unfair of me to do it to him. But I know the greater injustice has been committed against my husband and daughter.