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and simply “tell it” via scribble and click. But for me, the story—still ongoing—isn’t yet ready to be told. Or at least I’m not ready to tell it. There is nothing to save, only something to salvage, and what good can words possibly do?
    Let the body first be pulled from the river
, I think.
Maybe I’ll tell it then
.

Dispatches from
the Drownings
    1.
    It is our first night in a new town and we sleep soundly. Brush teeth, crawl beneath sheets, and listen to the crickets just beyond the bedroom window. There is a river beyond the window, and in that river, a boy. A boy who—we will learn the next day—has the river inside of him, too.
    2.
    Our lives begin in the water. In utero, a fetus relies solely on its mother’s water-based womb. Oxygen is not yet introduced through the fetal lungs, but through the umbilical cord—a more direct route. Nevertheless, with the snip of the scissors, this route closes for good.
Dear Child, if you wish to live, you must try to trust your lungs
 . . .
    3.
    On the third day, God divided water from earth and two days later he filled them. “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures,” he cried, “and let birds fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” Despite his miracle, God’s work remained incomplete. On the sixth day God created humans, endowing us with lungs and free will. Sixteen hundred years later, he drowned us like dogs in the Flood.
    4.
    As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, thirty-eight dogs were drowned in the name of science. Professor E. A. Schafer of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society held them beneath the water to gain insight into how life leaves a body.
    5.
    Holocaust (n.): destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, esp. caused by fire . . .
    6.
    Since God chose water, do we call it a mass execution instead?
    7.
    French royalists were no strangers to mass executions. In 1793–1794, those loyal to the crown were often condemned to death by drowning. By year’s end, revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Carrier had water on his hands. In the city of Nantes, he ordered the drowning of an estimated four thousand royalists in the Loire River. Carrier dubbed the Loire the “National Bathtub”—a nod to the guillotine, which was dubbed the “National Razor.”
    8.
    Others, too, had water on their minds. When man could not decide if a witch was a witch, the witch was hurled into the river. The tests were always conclusive: the innocent sank while the guilty stayed afloat.
    9.
    In Archimedes’s book,
On Floating Bodies
(250 BCE ), the founder of hydrostatics notes, “Any body wholly or partially immersed in a fluid experiences an upward force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.” Translation: Anybody smaller than the body of water in which the body is placed is capable of floating. Translation: Adherence to the principles of science may be an admission of witchcraft.
    10.
    By the eighteenth century, drowning victims were not treated with hands clasped in prayer, but hands clasped to a chest. Though resuscitation seemed like witchcraft, God himself had given us the clues. In Genesis, he breathed life into Adam’s nostrils, and humans took careful note.
    11.
    On December 14, 1650, Anne Greene—sentenced for murdering her stillborn child—was hanged in Oxford, England. She refused to die. Greene’s friends tugged on her dangling legs to hasten Death, but Death refused to be hurried. When at last it was believed that Death had taken mercy on her, Greene’s body was placed in a coffin. But even there she retained a spark of life. In an attempt to extinguish it, a merciful man struck her hard on the chest, but the blow only served to further restore her. Letthe record show that they could not kill Anne Greene, despite their best efforts. However, this incident was not viewed as the world’s first