Anna - The Lake at Dusk
A short story written by Missy Moo
Artwork by Missy Moo
Anna nearly didn’t come.
She’d had the excuses lined up since lunchtime, neat as tins in a cupboard. The washing still in the machine. Her mum’s prescription to pick up on Thursday, which meant ringing the surgery tomorrow, which meant remembering to ring the surgery tomorrow. A text from her son asking if she’d “seen his grey hoodie,” as if she carried a map of every item of clothing he’d ever owned. An email marked urgent that wasn’t.
And under all of it, the old familiar voice: Who do you think you are, swimming in a lake at your age? In October? Go home. Put the kettle on. Be sensible.
But she’d packed the bag the night before, and some part of her — a quieter part, one she didn’t hear from very often — had put it in the boot of the car without asking permission.
So here she was.
The car park was empty apart from a camper van with its curtains drawn. Anna sat for a moment with the engine off, listening to it tick as it cooled. Her hands were still on the steering wheel. She noticed she was gripping it.
She let go.
Outside, the air had that sharp, clean edge of early autumn evening. It smelt of wet bracken and woodsmoke from somewhere she couldn’t see. The path down to the water was soft underfoot, a carpet of fallen leaves, copper and rust and gold, and they made a sound like whispering when she walked through them.
The lake lay still and silver-grey, holding the last of the light. The sky above it was fading from peach to lilac to a deep, soft blue, and the far shore had already dissolved into a dark line of trees.
There was no one else here. Just Anna, and the water, and the evening arriving.
Getting changed was the usual performance. Towel robe over her head, wriggling out of her jeans like a teenager at the beach, one hand clutching the robe shut. She caught herself doing it — the hiding, the arranging — and almost laughed. Who exactly is watching, Anna? The ducks?
Her swimsuit was yellow. Properly yellow, buttercup yellow, the colour of egg yolks and summer. It had been an end-of-sale bargain, reduced and reduced again, and on the website it had been modelled by a woman about half her width with legs up to her ears, laughing on a beach somewhere hot. Anna had clicked buy in a fit of defiance at eleven o’clock one night and then spent three days half hoping it would get lost in the post.
It hadn’t. And here it was.
She pulled on her swim hat last, her favourite bright pink one, snapping it over her ears. It was not a flattering hat. It was not meant to be. It was meant to be seen: a little beacon bobbing on the water so that anyone on the bank would know there was a woman out there. Pink hat, yellow costume. She looked, she thought, like a packet of sherbet.
When she took off the robe, the cold air found every part of her at once. Her upper arms. The softness of her stomach that had carried two babies and several decades of biscuits. The backs of her thighs. The skin on her chest that had started to crease in a way she’d only recently noticed in the bathroom mirror.
The voice started up again, right on cue. Look at the state of you.
And for once, Anna didn’t argue with it. She didn’t agree with it either. She just noticed it — the way you notice a car alarm going off in another street. Oh. There’s that thought again.
It was only a thought. It wasn’t the lake. It wasn’t the sky. It wasn’t her.
The first step into the water took her breath clean away.
Cold wrapped round her ankles like iron bands. Then her shins. The stones on the bottom were smooth and slippery with weed, and she felt her way forward slowly, arms held out from her sides like a tightrope walker. Every nerve in her legs lit up, fizzing and burning at the same time.
Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe.
Her breath came out ragged and loud in the silence. She made herself slow it down. In through the nose. Long, slow out through the mouth. The water reached her knees. Her thighs. That moment — every cold-water swimmer knows it — when it reaches your middle and your whole body shouts NO.
She let out a noise that was half gasp, half laugh, and it bounced off the water and came back to her.
Then she lowered her shoulders under, and pushed off.
For the first ten seconds there was nothing in her mind at all.
No to-do list. No surgery phone call. No grey hoodie. No email. No worrying about her mum, or her daughter’s new boyfriend, or whether she’d said the wrong thing at work on Monday, or the hot flush that had ambushed her in the middle of a meeting last week, or what she was going to do with the next twenty years of her life.
There was only cold. Only now. Only the shock of being completely, totally alive.
Her skin tingled, then prickled, then burned, then — slowly — began to feel something like warmth. Not real warmth. Something stranger. A glow that seemed to come from inside rather than out.
She swam a slow breaststroke, head up, chin just above the surface. The water was dark and silky and smelt of peat and leaves. Each stroke made a soft ripple that spread out in rings across the surface, catching the last bit of light, silver on black.
She turned onto her back and let the water hold her.
Her ears went under, and the world changed. The sounds of the shore disappeared, and in their place came the deep, muffled hum of the lake itself — her own heartbeat, the creak of her breath, a kind of underwater hush like the inside of a shell.
Above her, the sky had deepened to indigo.
And there — right there — was the first star.
Just one. Small and bright and steady, directly above her, as if it had been waiting for her to look up.
Anna lay very still and watched it. She realised she couldn’t remember the last time she’d watched a star appear. She’d spent years looking down — at phones, at lists, at school bags and shopping lists and spreadsheets and the kitchen floor that always needed sweeping. She’d spent years looking ahead — to the next thing, the next worry, the next person who needed something from her.
She had forgotten, somewhere along the way, to simply look up.
A second star appeared. Then a third. Then, as her eyes adjusted, more than she could count, pricking through the dark one by one like someone was slowly turning on the lights of a very large house.
Floating there, with the cold water cradling her, a thought drifted in — not the nagging voice this time, but something softer.
All those stories I tell about myself.
Too old. Too tired. Too much. Not enough. The one who copes. The one who holds it together. The one who always says “I’m fine.”
She had carried those stories for so long she’d mistaken them for the truth. She’d built a whole life around them, like a house built around a wardrobe that no longer fitted.
But the lake didn’t know any of those stories. The stars didn’t know them. The water didn’t care how old she was, or what size her swimsuit was, or whether the washing was done. It simply held her, exactly as she was.
And in that holding, Anna felt something she hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Not happiness, exactly. Something quieter and deeper than that.
Space.
As if the tight knot she’d carried in her chest for years had quietly come undone, and there was room in there now. Room to breathe. Room to just be.
She wasn’t a mum right now. Or a daughter. Or an employee, or a wife, or the woman who remembered everyone’s birthdays. She wasn’t a problem to be fixed or a body to be judged.
She was just awareness, floating in the dark in a pink hat and a sale-rack yellow swimsuit, watching the stars come out.
And underneath all the roles and all the noise, she realised, this had been here all along. The part of her that was still.
The part that watched. The part that had been there when she was seven years old, lying on the lawn counting clouds, and was here now, fifty-two years old, floating under the stars.
It had never gone anywhere. She’d just stopped listening to it.
Her fingers had started to ache — that deep, bone-cold ache that told her it was time. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t push for one more minute to prove something. She simply listened to her body, and turned, and swam slowly back towards the shore.
Getting out was clumsy and graceless. Her feet were numb and she wobbled over the stones, arms flailing, and she laughed out loud — a proper laugh, from the belly — because she must look ridiculous, and she didn’t care. Not even a little bit.
She wrapped herself in the robe and stood on the bank, skin red and roaring, heart thudding, every cell in her body humming like a struck bell. Steam rose off her shoulders into the cold air.
She poured tea from the flask with trembling hands. It was too sweet and slightly stewed and it was the best cup of tea she had ever tasted. She held it in both hands and felt the heat seep into her palms, and she watched her breath cloud in front of her, and she looked up.
The whole sky was full of stars now.
On the drive home, her phone buzzed on the passenger seat. Probably the hoodie again. Probably the email.
She let it buzz.
They would all still be there when she got home. The washing. The phone call. The worries. Life would carry on being full and messy and demanding, the way it always was.
But something had shifted. She knew now that she could step out of it. That underneath all the noise, there was a stillness she could come back to. Not by running away from her life, but by being fully, completely in it — one breath, one stroke, one star at a time.
She’d come back next week, she decided.
And this time, she wouldn’t need to talk herself into it.
Love from Missy Moo x
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