The Hollow in the Drain

I used to think the world was made of solid things. The gravel path behind our apartment in Utrecht, the rusted swing set in the courtyard, the concrete walls of the gym where I practiced my freestyle strokes—all of it seemed permanent, unyielding. That was before the floods. Before I met the woman in the rain.

I was fifteen, living with my mother in a ground-floor flat near the Oudegracht canal. That spring, the rains came and didn’t stop. The government called it a ‘once-in-a-century event,’ but to us it was just a slow, creeping disaster. Water seeped into the basement, then the hallway, then the cracks in the kitchen tiles. My mother put sandbags at the door, but she might as well have tried to hold back the ocean with a colander.

I started swimming at the municipal pool, not for exercise, but because the water was the only place that made sense. The chlorine burned my eyes, and the echoing laps of other swimmers blurred into a white noise that drowned out the drip-drip-drip of our apartment. It was there, in the shallow end, that I first saw her—not a face, but a suggestion: a dark strand floating like a water snake, a swirl of bubbles rising from nowhere. I brushed it off as my imagination playing tricks, a trick of the light through the tiled ceiling.

But the dreams started the same week. In them, I was not me. I was a man with a scar crossing his eyebrow and a gold ring in his right ear. I stood on a foggy bridge over a canal that was not the Oudegracht, and below, the water churned with something heavy. The woman’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere, soft as silk and cold as the bottom of a well. ‘You were a thief,’ she said. ‘You took what was not yours, and now the water has come to collect.’

I woke up gasping, my sheets soaked with sweat, the taste of copper in my mouth. I told my mother about the dreams, but she said it was ‘just puberty,’ and that the flood had made us all anxious. She didn’t see the way the puddles on the sidewalk grew deeper when I walked past, how the rain seemed to fall in a circle around me, as if I were the eye of a storm.

One Saturday, while helping a neighbor carry groceries, I passed a half-flooded construction site near the train station. A large drainage pipe jutted out of the muddy ground, its mouth gaping like a hungry throat. The water inside was dark, almost black, and it moved with a sluggish, oily current. Something about it pulled me, a taut string in my chest. I knelt at the edge, peering into the gloom, and that’s when I heard the voice again, not in my head but in the air: ‘Thief. Liar. It is time to return what you stole.’

A figure emerged from the shadows of the pipe—a woman with skin the color of damp ash, her hair hanging like wet ropes that dripped with silt. Her eyes were not eyes but empty sockets, and from them, small eels wriggled out, dropping into the water with soft plops. She extended a hand, fingers long and webbed. On her palm lay a single gold earring, identical to the one in my dream. ‘Your soul, boy,’ she said, ‘was stitched to mine long ago. You wore my ring in your past life. You took it from my corpse to pay your debts.’

The realization struck me like a physical blow. I had been born with a tiny hole in my right ear, the doctors had called me ‘pirate,’ and I had a scar on my eyebrow from a bicycle accident when I was seven. It all clicked—the dreams, the fear, the way water seemed to follow me. This was not a random haunting; it was a debt long overdue.

I tried to run, but my feet were rooted in the mud. The woman stepped closer, and I could smell the rot of the canal, the decay of forgotten things. ‘I died in that water,’ she said, ‘because you pushed me in to steal my jewelry. You have been reborn, but I have not. I am stuck between, and I need your body to live again.’

Her icy fingers brushed my cheek, and in that instant, I felt my legs give way. I tumbled into the pipe, the water closing over my head. It was not cold; it was warm, like blood, and it filled my mouth, my lungs. I tried to struggle, but the current was too strong, pulling me deeper, into a darkness that had no end. The last thing I saw was her face, smiling with teeth like broken glass, and then the blackness swallowed me.

I woke up on the bank of the canal, coughing water, my clothes soaked, my earring gone. The rain had stopped. The sun was breaking through the clouds, and the city was beginning to dry out. But when I looked at my reflection in a puddle, I saw not my own face, but hers—pale, hollow, the eels writhing in my eyes. And I knew I was no longer alone in my skin. The woman had returned, and I was the vessel she would use to walk the land of the living.

Every day since, I feel her shifting inside me. I have to eat with her hunger, sleep with her restlessness. And when it rains, which it does often now, I find myself drawn to the nearest drain, listening for the eels, and I wonder if this is what my former life earned. I am not Merwin anymore. I am the hollow in the drain, the echo in the gutter, the one who stole and was stolen. And the water will never let me go.