Some loves do not end at the water. They wait under it.
Three years ago, in a candlelit room off Esplanade, Maren and Lark were bound: two girls, two needles, their blood worked into matching ink so that nothing could ever part them.
It was meant to be a promise. It was a trap.
When Lark drowns in a still red backwater and New Orleans writes it off as misadventure, the tattoo over Maren’s heart wakes.
It moves. It grieves. It pulls her, night after night, toward the water that took her wife, and toward the women who put her there.
But the mark is not only Lark. Part of it is a leash, and the people who drowned her are patient, and they want Maren to finish what they began, gladly, with her own two hands.
To free the woman she loves, Maren will have to lose her. For good.
But Rowan got out of the faith that drowned Lark, and Rowan is still here, and still alive, and the choice the water finally forces is the one Maren has spent her whole life running from: whether to go on loving the dead, or let herself be loved by the living.
Slackwater is a sapphic New Orleans gothic about grief, devotion, and learning to choose the living over the dead. For readers of Julia Armfield, Alexis Henderson, and Sarah Waters.
