Other stories for this prompt

Drowning in the sea. That was the trick of it. To be seen to swoon, to fall to the bottom. The pretend to expire. It was the pearls that weighed me down. They alway do. Spiros bought them for the moon. That is what he said. The moon. As if the moon had a price. All things had a price. He gave them to me in the back garden of the hotel under a moon that was more red that white. A bad luck moon. But the band played on in the gallery and couples in their best passed under...

Drowning in the sea. That was the trick of it. To be seen to swoon, to fall to the bottom. The pretend to expire. It was the pearls that weighed me down. They alway do. Spiros bought them for the moon. That is what he said. The moon. As if the moon had a price. All things had a price. He gave them to me in the back garden of the hotel under a moon that was more red that white. A bad luck moon. But the band played on in the gallery and couples in their best passed under...

Marjorie was drowning. She felt the pull of the water on her legs and the icy shock in her heart. She hadn't even felt the hands on her back as she strolled along the darkened pier. She knew she was going to die and deep within her soul knew that she didn't want to. She kicked with all her might and little by little she began to ascend toward the surface. Her legs tangled up in weed attached to the piers structure like an obscene cat's cradle. She hauled at it, tearing her skin as she did so, the salt...

I was on my way home from the party of the year. I was dressed up and driving across the wooden bridge over the deepest part of the river. Then suddenly, CRASH! My car was flying out over the river. Then I was in the icy cold water. Bubbles exploded from my nose and mouth. My body was so cold I couldn't move my sinking arms. The heavy black marble sized pearls around my neck felt like a chain weighing me down. My eyes open in shock took ink only darkness...and my own shadow.. cast into the sandy floor of...

The thing about mermaids is, well, that they aren't.

You're thinking seashell bikinis and fish tails, but that isn't it. Not at all.

My cousin Marjorie, this is back in '30, mind you, and the turn for the worse had been taken by all of us. She kept her things, her jewels and her dresses. They became her scales, her fins.

She decided to become a mermaid in the same way that some of us choose to marry. It was deliberate, it took forethought. She knew that she would dive beneath the waves to never return. Perhaps she would give...

The key couldn't break.
Forged by the hand of fate
In the fires of adversity
Her love would mold
The white-hot metal
Into the shape it was meant to take
Then
Cooled by her touch
Quenched with desire
It would unlock
Anything

Oh to drown in ones finest. Her shawl spread around her like tentacles, the pearl necklace, restored to its natural place shimmered under the sodium lights as the diaphanous skirt became squid-like. To prepare for this moment, to understand that you will be suspended in front of hundreds, thousands on a good night. Perhaps there is no better way to die than in front of an adoring gaze.

There would be no death of course, no final throes, no panicked look. The calmness of the water as she let herself go limp, felt herself carried by the eyes of the...

Ricky did not realize that Luca Brazzi was a man's name, and so, all confused, he had dumped someone completely different, the wife of an architect named Lucia Brazziana (the wife not the architect), in the Hudson river, and had then sent a coded message to the Corlione family. As for Luca Brazzi, he did not sleep with the fishes; he simply overslept. So one can imagine Titaglia's confusion when he showed up, unannounced, with an icepick in hand, and stabbed it through Titaglia's eyeball.

This was in the era before horse heads and cardinals. When a vague optimism was...

Silence.
The vicar cleared his throat. 'Do you Isabella Riley take....'
'I heard you.' she said, suddenly reappearing from the dream world which had captivated. 'I er... I don't.'
Suddenly aware of a hundred pairs of eyes, she took a deep breath. Ben's mouth fell open. Shock visibly clear on his face.
'Iz?'
'don't Ben.' she murmured. She had to get out of this church. She couldn't possibly marry him. Be commited to one man for the rest of her life. She just couldn't do it.
'But Iz. What? I mean, why?'
'I'm sorry Ben. I really am so, so...

Captive. Surrounded by watr, the woman could not breathe, could not fight, could not even open her eyes. Her waist was bound and her feet were weighted and she was sinking. Soon to be erased.

The man in the boat had asked her one last question before he rolled her out. Now, sinking like a parachuter, she did not think about her little boy at home, or her parents (they would be so sad), or all the things she would leave behind. No. Her last moments, the last grains of sand in her proverbial hourglass, and Mari was thinking about...