Shut Up And Take My Money Fry

Chapter 12 — The Memory Underwater

Morning did not arrive so much as appear.
The light over the water was flat and silver, the kind of brightness that erases edges.
The lake lay unbroken—no wind, no insect trace, not even the faint rings of a fish.
Its surface held the farmhouse with impossible precision, sharper than the real thing: every board straight, every shutter un-weathered, every window softly lit.

But in the true house behind them, all those windows were dark.

Josephine stood barefoot in the grass. Dew soaked her hem, cold enough to make her gasp, yet she didn’t step back.
Each breath seemed to draw her closer until she was kneeling at the bank.
She leaned over the water, and her reflection leaned back, a half-beat late.

The surface trembled, and her face changed.
Older. Paler. The eyes calmer, as if they had already watched this moment end a hundred times.
When the wind finally stirred, it came from the reflection, not the air around her.

Beneath the first layer of light another world unfolded.
The same farmhouse stood under the surface, its roof gleaming as though the sun shone from beneath.
Inside its drowned rooms, shadowed figures moved through familiar gestures—Margaret wiping a table, Thomas lighting a match that never burned out, a small girl running in a loop from hallway to door.

Josephine’s throat tightened.
The underwater version of herself paused mid-stride and looked upward, straight into her eyes.
The motion sent ripples outward, bending the reflection until both houses—the real and the sunken—blurred into one trembling shape.

Margaret’s footsteps were soundless on the grass.
When she reached her daughter’s side, the smell of the attic returned—chalk, dust, and a faint trace of rain on old wood.

“What do you see?” she asked.
Josephine pointed wordlessly.

Margaret knelt and let her hand touch the surface.
Instead of cold, she felt texture—grain like wood, smooth and warm.
For an instant she could feel the house breathing through the lake, inhaling memory and exhaling images.

“It isn’t reflecting us,” she whispered. “It’s remembering us.”

A pulse of light bloomed in the reflection—soft red, steady, rhythmic.
It spread through the underwater windows like the beat of a heart, then faded to a slow glow.
The ripples stilled, leaving the mirrored house gleaming below.

From somewhere under the surface, faint as breath against glass, a voice spoke both their names—first the child’s, then the mother’s—and the sound drifted upward until it vanished into the morning air.

The lake went perfectly still again.
Even their own reflections refused to move.