The Crumbling Face Over the Reservoir

In the early weeks of April, when the frost was finally bleeding out of the ground and the reservoir was still a sheet of black glass, I woke with a name burning on my lips. In the dream, I had been standing on the shore of that reservoir, the water perfectly still, and above me the sky was not sky but a vast, pale membrane. And on that membrane, pressed like a leaf in wax, was the face of my sister’s husband, Elias. His features were clear at first, but as I watched, the edges began to flake, like old paint, and chunks of his cheeks fell away, revealing dark honeycombs beneath. The whole time, his eyes were fixed on me, and his mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear a word. I woke with a start, my sheets soaked, and the taste of dust in my mouth. I told myself it was the anxiety of the season, the way the thaw always unsettled me, but the image clung to me like cobwebs, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

That afternoon, my phone buzzed with a number I didn’t recognize. It was my Aunt Cora, who never called except for holidays, and her voice was strained, not with tears but with that peculiar calm that people adopt when they’re about to deliver news that will shatter you. She asked after my parents before I could even speak. They were at my sister’s house, she said, because Elias had walked into the woods behind their property that morning, put a shotgun to his head, and pulled the trigger. The reservoir was visible from their back porch, and the police had found his body near the waterline, half in the reeds. I stood there, the phone pressed to my ear, and I realized that the dream had been a premonition. I had seen his face decay in the sky, and now he was gone. But the dream didn’t feel like a warning. It felt like a reckoning, and that night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept staring at the ceiling, half-expecting his face to appear there, crumbling.

The weeks that followed were a blur of grief and paperwork. My sister, Nina, was hollow, going through the motions of a funeral she never wanted. Elias’s death was ruled a suicide, but there were murmurs, low and dark, about why. He had been acting strange for months, they said, talking about voices coming from the water, about the reservoir having a pulse. I had dismissed it as the stress of his job, but now I couldn’t ignore the fact that my dream had been too specific, too visceral. I started going to the reservoir at dusk, not to mourn but to understand. The water was still, opaque, and I would stand at the edge, listening, but all I heard was the rustle of reeds and the distant cry of a loon. One evening, as the sun bled orange into the water, I saw a shape beneath the surface, a pale oval that could have been a face. I blinked, and it was gone, but my heart hammered in my chest, and I knew that the reservoir had claimed Elias in more ways than one.

A week later, my own reflection in the bathroom mirror began to change. At first, it was subtle, a slight grayness at the temples, a faint sagging under the eyes. But within days, my skin started to feel brittle, and when I touched my cheek, a small flake came off, like dry paint. I looked in the mirror and saw the beginning of the same decay I had witnessed in my dream. Panic seized me. I called Nina, but she didn’t answer. I drove to her house, and when I walked in, the air was thick with dust. She was sitting in the dark, staring at the wall, and when she turned to me, I saw that her face was flawless, untouched. But behind her, on the wall, was a patch of damp that had spread into a rough outline, and it looked like a face—Elias’s face—grimacing and rotting. I tried to wipe it away, but the plaster crumbled under my fingers, and the face seemed to shift, to focus on me with hollow eyes.

That night, I had the dream again, but this time I was not on the shore. I was in the water, up to my waist, and the sky was the same pale membrane. Elias’s face was not in the sky but in the water, drifting toward me, and as it came close, I saw that it was not a face but a mask, and underneath was nothing but a swarm of tiny black flies. They spilled out of his mouth and nose, and they crawled into my ears, whispering in a language I almost understood. I woke with a scream, but the flies were real, a cloud of them circling the ceiling fan. I fled the house, driving to warn Nina, but when I arrived, her house was empty, the door swinging open. In the backyard, the grass was dead in a perfect circle, and at the center was a mound of fresh earth. I knew, with a certainty that made my bones ache, that Nina had buried something, and I fell to my knees, digging with my bare hands. I uncovered a wooden box, and inside was a photograph of Elias, his face half-erased by what looked like acid, and a lock of my hair, tied with a black ribbon.

I don’t remember the drive back to the reservoir, but I found myself there at dawn, the water like mercury. The surface was disturbed, ripples spreading from the center, and slowly, a figure rose—not Elias, but something that wore his shape like a coat. It beckoned to me with a finger of bone, and I waded in, the cold water biting my ankles, my knees, my waist. The figure opened its mouth, and a voice that was not his said, ‘You are the last one. The dream was the key.’ I looked down at my hands, and they were transparent, the skin flaking away like ash. I realized that the dream had never been about Elias. It had been about me. I had been the one decaying all along, and the reservoir was not a place but a doorway. I saw my reflection in the water, and it was my face, crumbling, cracking, falling apart. And then I was under the water, and I could breathe, and the flies were inside me, and I was finally whole. The last thing I saw was the sky, and in the sky was the face I had seen in the beginning, but it was my own, and it was smiling.

They found my clothes on the shore, neatly folded, and a note in my handwriting that said only, ‘I saw him first.’ Nina never spoke of me again, and she moved away before the summer. But sometimes, when I look out from the water’s depths, I see the living walking along the shore, and I wonder if they know that the reservoir is not a body of water but a womb, and I am waiting to be born again in the next dreamer’s sky.