This far out in the water, anything could happen, and the shore is but a distant and warm memory. It isn’t the shore she thinks of when she’s pulled under, she doesn’t even think of air. She thinks of Hercules and his Labors of atonement. This Labor is no lion, no hydra, no Cerberus, but some terrible combination: skin like scales, hair like seaweed, fangs like a snake.

Like any open water swimmer, she has a knife. She uses it and breaks free, breaks the water for air, and ends up back on the rocky beach without knowing how.

No Oracle had told her to come here, this tiny island of sixty houses, cradled in the cold Atlantic. She’s here chasing something she can’t see, like the hind, just out of reach.

“Don’t go into the water.”

It’s stamped on the signs, it’s wrought in the door carvings, a superstition steeping down to the very bedrock of the island; she can read it on every concerned glance in her direction, sees it etched into the frown lines of every village elder. It’s not a rule, it’s a way of life: respect what isn’t yours. Don’t go into the ocean.

She’s never been afraid of deep waters.

Sometimes the curious watch her as she wades into the whiplash waves. Perhaps they recognize her, saw her glorious downfall on television. Or perhaps they’re as isolated as the island they live on, and simply want to study the newest oddity, ready to fetch her dead body when it eventually washes up on the beach.

The first encounter left her cold in her bones, lungs haunted with the memory of suffocation; she sits in her tiny tub, the bathwater up to her nose, but the water abruptly chills. It smells of salt and storm--

--she plunges into deep cold water, limb-to-limb with the Old Woman of the Sea, struggling out of the iron grip of defeat.

The sea is mine, the creature hisses into some ethereal plane, where monster meets man.

But she's not a (disgraced) Olympic swimmer for nothing. She fights off her long and many limbed attacker and when she breaks the surface, she's back in her bathtub.

She sees the creature’s face in the puddles of water in sodden dirt paths, hears her sibilant hiss in the sluice of rain against the window, feels her icy grip whenever the waves crest the rocks and spray her in freezing mist. Don’t go in the water. The depths are mine. The currents belong to me. This is no place for a human.

What were the Labors, but to test man? To test man against the terrible ordeals of living, to test him against himself, and see if he was worthy?

She pulls off her jacket, leaves her boots on the rocks, and runs towards the edge of the cliff.

Oh yeah? She says as her body cuts through the surface like a bullet shattering glass, shards of freezing water slicing through her body. Come and stop me.

The next time the creature attacks her, she dives deeper, inspiring a chase; she is beaten, the creature has the tail of a fish, and spirals towards the gloomy bottom leaving nothing behind but a bright flash of scales and a trail of bubbles. Then the creature shoots up from out of the dark and barrels into her, pushing her up up up up until she’s out of the water.

The creature says: Do not come back.

She answers: I bet I can go faster than you. Farther than you. Are you afraid to find out?

She throws herself back in the water the next day, and when the creature confronts her yet again, she says race you to the next island.

They race to the next island and the creature beats her by several hours; so they race to the next and the next, until days have passed and she can no longer feel her legs and her vision is spotting at the edges. She doesn’t dream of land even then, but she closes her eyes and wakes up in her bathtub, the water surprisingly warm.

She goes to her closet and opens her suitcase. Inside, there’s a small cloth bag. Ill gotten goods, but she knows what to do with them now. The water feels more like home than land, walking is strange but swimming has become what it always should have been (could have been): first nature.

I have an offering.

The gold metal glints strangely deep in the water; she watches it float to the depths, only to be snatched up in a quick predatory movement.

It is sufficient. But it is yours.

No. I hadn’t earned it. Not honestly. But you have.

She holds out a hand Ready for another race?

The creature takes it, and that feels like an honest victory, something far more precious than Olympic Gold.