Atop a hill on the outskirts of the village, there stands a well. In the old days, folks said the well was known to grant people their deepest desires. They had only to peer into it and their dreams would somehow be fulfilled. There are those who say that the well has lost its powers now. That it has been rendered a mere relic, something to draw water from.

But, the well retains some of its magic still.

 

A girl trudges toward the well hours after her mother had held her arm above an open flame. What’s left of her flesh is wrapped in makeshift bandages: dishcloths and rags torn from garments she had long outgrown. The girl had been whimpering from the moonly pains that began to visit her a few years prior, their continual pangs making it onerous to stir the rice. You think you suffer? her mother had spit.

A second later, the pot had been knocked to the ground, the girl’s wrist was seized, and the girl shrieked for as long as it took to lose her senses. When she came to, the skin of her forearm was split and black, charred rough strips surrounding a turgid red gash.

Mercifully, her mother was snoring in the adjoining room, having inhaled the vapors of the minty green plant she was oft fond of. The rice was still scattered on the baked clay floor.

 

The girl struggles to lower the bucket with the rope. She has never done this one-handed. But the last of their water ebbed away along with the rice, and she needs to wet her arm. She succeeds in pulling up the bucket and empties its cooling relief over her poor, oozing flesh.

As she peers into the well to return the bucket, she sees a face that is not her own. It’s a beautiful face, male and grown. She watches, transfixed, as it morphs into another that is just as beautiful, but strikingly familiar. The water is rippling, the image blurred, but wide-eyed, the girl realizes that this face is hers, albeit much older. The faces continue changing into each other until they come to rest side by side, cheeks touching, and the girl is wonderstruck. She wonders if this is the face of the man that will someday end her long-suffering.

 

The girl’s mother had birthed her at an unusually young age after failing to kill her in the womb. Her hatred of the child was rooted in its being unwanted. Her beauty had led her to be touched by the man who sired it. After she had borne her daughter, no man touched her again. The girl could remember how, years ago, her mother had tried to hurl herself through a window. The jagged glass ruptured her skin on the way out. When the wounds healed, she was left with deep brown grooves snaking down the length of her right thigh, coarse and coiled and everlasting. The girl’s now-ruined left arm was like its inverse, each scarred limb the other’s transposed twin.

 

From the night that the girl saw the man in the well, she steals away to it quite often in the dark. Without fail, the well reveals his face to her. She is growing enamored with him, wishes that she were already as old as she is in the well. Is that when he will claim her? Where will he come from? She knows she has never seen his face in the village. At home, atop her makeshift bed of wool-woven rugs, she envisions what his body may look like, the parts that the well does not show her, and imagines how it feels beneath her naked palms.

 

It is a few months since the first instance of the face in the well. She is in town, meant to barter milk from their goat. That is when she spots him. He is behind another wooden stall with an older man, pulling out potatoes from a taupe sack: a boy, the same face she has been seeing night after night, but rounded, softened with youth; it is not yet time. Thrills flood the girl’s senses. She would know him anywhere. The entire afternoon, she attempts to catch his eye. It is for naught, but she can bear this. They have years.

 

But there are those who say that the well is now a trickster. And that only those among the less vulnerable should look upon its waters anymore.

There are still those who say that the well has always been so. Those who say that it has a way of making people believe that what it shows them is true.

 

Some days following the encounter in town, the girl sees the boy loitering near her hut. She hides her elation even better than she does her mangled arm. She greets him. He claims to be thirsty. She goes into the hut and comes back with a pail of well water she’d drawn. He ladles it in his hands and she watches as his lips purse, sucking his skin dry, wetness sliding and dripping from his chin. She is enthralled, believes that his drinking water from the well, water she has handed to him, is significant somehow.

He thanks her and leaves. She stares after him from her window after he walks away, not even noting the sound of her mother setting off to the market.

 

The girl is at the well again the same night. Hungrily, she peers into the water.

What she sees is unlike anything she has been shown before.

Deep in the well, she and the man are entwined together, each face obscuring the other, lips joined and meeting incessantly. Their bare, sleek bodies are gummed as closely as two grains of steamed rice and the waves make them dance, maneuvering them this way and that, over, under, slipping and sliding, in and out.

The girl’s mouth salivates. She climbs up on the rim of the well, reaching in, desperate to seize this vision, this prophecy, nothing can bring her more bliss than what she is seeing.

Until one of the limber legs twists forward. The girl’s mouth dries and her eyes are aghast. Spiraling down the leg is a puckered brown scar.

 

It is a week following the abhorrence she saw in the well. In the nights since, the girl has not drawn water from it nor slept a wink. She turns the vision in her mind over and over, agonizing about what it can mean.

She has never seen her mother with a man. No man would waste a breath on her now; she is used, defiled, dregs.

But her beauty remains. The girl feels a fool, mistaking the face as her own. Of course a boy who was nearly a man would choose a woman over something barely more than a child. And especially when her body was marred in ways easily concealed! What would he care if the woman was a monster to her own blood? What did it matter whom she tortured, if her hips could still rock against his, if she could please him in ways an unseasoned girl could only imagine?

Each passing night, her teeth dig deeper and deeper into her lip until there is a crusted line of red running from one end to the other.

 

The camphoraceous fumes that greet her nose in her mother’s room are still thick and heavy. They cling to the air as closely as her mother clings to their source.

The girl stands by the mattress. On it, her mother lies inert. In the girl’s hands is a hemp-stuffed pillow. Her eyes are sunken and red. She does not waver; whenever doubt seeped into her mind, she had only to look at her forearm.

She steps forward and pulls back the hair from her mother’s face. The face she will have someday. Pity creeps into her heart. The woman did not deserve the injustices that befell her in youth. What had followed was a cycle, an expulsion of amassed pain. It could not be dispelled nor evaporated, it had to be unleashed the way clouds poured the rains they harbored, rather than condensed into the buried recesses of wells. Despite her sins, she has suffered plenty.

It is just as well, then, that her stupor will not let her feel any suffering now.

The girl plunges the pillow onto her face and holds even after her limbs start to thrash. What could she be dreaming of, she wonders? Or, who?