Twin Tides, page 1
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Text copyright © 2025 by Hien Nguyen
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Contents
Dedication
Prologue: The Ghoul
Chapter One: Aria
Chapter Two: Caliste
Chapter Three: Aria
Chapter Four: Aria
Chapter Five: Caliste
Chapter Six: Caliste
Chapter Seven: The Ghoul
Chapter Eight: Aria
Chapter Nine: Caliste
Chapter Ten: Aria
Chapter Eleven: Caliste
Chapter Twelve: Aria
Chapter Thirteen: Caliste
Chapter Fourteen: The Ghoul
Chapter Fifteen: Caliste
Chapter Sixteen: Aria
Chapter Seventeen: Caliste
Chapter Eighteen: Caliste
Chapter Nineteen: Aria
Chapter Twenty: Caliste
Chapter Twenty-One: Caliste
Chapter Twenty-Two: Caliste
Chapter Twenty-Three: Aria
Chapter Twenty-Four: Aria
Chapter Twenty-Five: Caliste
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Ghoul
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Aria
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_154225248_
To motherless daughters:
May you never feel shame for your grief or your ferocity.
Prologue
The Ghoul
I lie in the bottom of the riverbed. My eyes are shut as I pretend to sleep, but my skin, punctured and tattered, feels everything. The wake of fish zipping above. Tiny, microscopic beings. In the bowels of the river, the bed load layer is full of heavy grit and gravel too coarse to float. The sharpness grates along my skin. Here, the velocity of the water is slow, so whatever makes its way to the bed load is in for a lifetime of languid rotting.
I know this water well. It is my home.
A jolt shoots through me, and my mind finds a sudden clarity, like a voice speaking to me after years of silence. Irritation stirs in my chest.
The voice tells me that this “home” is another place. Home is another body of water.
I haven’t always been here.
I belong elsewhere.
And yet, I can’t remember the place.
I’ve forgotten what it was like to hope as I’ve trailed this river. I once imagined a life beyond the water and its stillness of decay. I hoped for the next stage of death and imagined unloosing whatever tether held me here. I hoped for a future.
There is no future. There is only my now, which stretches both forward and backward endlessly.
My body aches, and I sit up, the sediment that settled on my torso scattering into the water. Thick bands of caliginous algae and death coat my tongue. My throat. My eyes. Only the lost remain in this area of the river—the corpses of moths and birds and weeds. They’ve become a part of me, entwining with my body until I feel almost whole again.
What does it even mean to be whole?
My body that is not quite a body slips into deeper water. I blink, the mud sliding off my eyes and streaking my face like tearstains. I am relieved that everything in the river belongs to itself. Dirt dissolves into more dirt. Leaves decompose and give way to seedlings. Everything in the water is reborn and given a chance to start a new life, one unencumbered by its last.
Except for me.
I recall a story uttered when I was small and lived elsewhere.
Back then, I was told first by my sister, then many others, that the water deserved respect. It deserved fear. The drowned. The dead. They—the local storytellers—called the spirits who haunt the waters Ma Da. Drowned ghosts. Bloated with weeds and white as bone, Ma Da were cursed to waste away in purgatory, unable to leave this life and move on to their next.
That is, unless they drowned a new victim so that another person could take their place. The lore said evil lurked in the depths, waiting to ensnare children and drag them under the tide. If warnings went unheeded, they’d become trapped. I once believed it was merely a tall tale to frighten and keep children safe.
I laugh, the gargle pulling in a thread of larvae and decay.
Safe.
I dismissed the tales of ghouls in the water as fallacy, and now I’ve become one.
I swim upstream, where the cliffs above jut out and the water clears. Something will be there to satisfy the hunger in my belly. More death awaits me, but so do the fat walleyes and pikes that nourish me, no matter how insufficiently.
Above the surface, I hear whispers of me. The living are afraid of the perverse and special type of power I wield.
A ghost that punishes naughty children.
The ghoul that ensnares the foolhardy and unwise.
A reaper of the rivers and lakes.
I am untouchable. And I punish them, the ones who bear their sins openly. I take pleasure in luring them into the water and digging my fetid fingers into the soft concave of their throats. My favorites die slowest.
One. He came to the river to wash off his wife’s blood, unaware that he was releasing the acrid scent of his crime into my domain. It clung to the roof of my mouth, dissipating only once his body stopped moving and I replaced his scent with mine.
Two. An old and decrepit fool, his sins long faded but still wafting from his skin. I counted multiple victims…all girls.
Three. She carried her son in a bag and threw him into the water, so freshly murdered that the boy still smelled of baby powder.
There have been six in total…and the scent of their immorality is etched on me. It’s been many months since my last kill. And every time one dies, I remember they can take my place. I could leave. I can leave. Pass on to begin anew.
But I couldn’t possibly do that. I have a talent for killing.
Here, they do not call me Ma Da.
Here, I have no one name. The story from my childhood…the cursed fable…is the only thing I still remember. It acts as a guide.
My life was taken from me; thus, I will take life in turn. That is my nature. And all I have left is my vengeance.
The current comes to an end as the murkiness shifts. It is then that the disturbance in the water reaches me, waves so violent, they remind me of the man throwing my body against rock. Something is in the water, and it doesn’t belong here.
Tentatively, I swim toward the origin of the quake. The vibrations intensify, rippling through my skin even more. I swim as fast as I can manage.
I approach the shore, the water’s surface darkening because of dense cypress branches reaching down to the earth. This place…is familiar to me, but I can’t remember why. Anticipation fills in my chest as the water shallows and stills in the slough.
It’s then that I see her: a girl caught in a tangle of cattails and bur reed. I notice when she suddenly stops. The water is taking her, and she begins to drown.
I stagger, clawing through the slippery mud toward her.
My skin is aflame in the faint sunlight, melting as I finally reach for the child’s still body.
Something about her small face—closed eyes and gaping mouth—both terrifies me and triggers a strange heaviness inside me. My fingers graze the threads of her dress.
Save her.
Protect her.
Please.
I push the girl’s body toward the shore. She sinks a few feet deep.
“Oh my god, there she is!” a foreign voice says. In it, there’s panic. Fear. A tremor that conveys an all-consuming love. That of a mother.
As the girl stirs in my hands, a face above the water makes eye contact with me. I’ve forgotten to hide. I ready myself to retreat, but the woman’s eyes move past me, widening in shock.
She is silent before she screams, a note both bloodcurdling and shrill. I don’t have much time to think before the tiny girl is snatched from me. My arms freed, I turn to look at what is behind me, and a swollen face catches the sunlight. I realize that this is the cause of the mother’s continued screams: a body buoying to the surface.
The body undulates and drifts closer to the shore. It’s a woman with long black hair and a vibrant red sweater with pearl buttons. Her face is serene.
It is my face.
My new body weakens, sinking back into the water’s depths. The wailing from the mother does not stop. Images of my death return to me, as does the sensation of my body dying. It is the same pain from moments ago—a sting slashing through me.
I picture his face and remember how his hands gripped my throat.
His pale skin wrinkled as his face contorted from the effort of squeezing. As I died, I considered that the folds of his neck formed a perfect divot for my fingers to puncture a hole and fill him with maggots. Once I was reborn…I became this.
Ghost. Daughter. Monster. Mother. Ghoul. Wife. I remember his laugh, a grotesque and jagged sound as I receded into the river. The echo of his laugh tears through me with such violence that a hole cracks at my core.
For all these years, I’ve wandered the water. I’ve forgotten my humanity. I was on the hunt, but I’ve long forgotten what I was hunting.
Seeing my face and my body returned to water awakens me, as does a thirst revived. The scent of the man’s blood lingers on my tongue, and I tremble. There is no longer a heart beating in my chest, but I feel its phantom: a frenetic and agitated pulse. It flutters, then ruptures…
like bombs
like shrapnel
like persistent memories
In my memory, there are gaps that were once full—
of words written
of words spoken
of words sung
of my history
I lost them all when I became trapped in this water. My life before I became stuck here…what was it like?
The man who killed me knows. And I will find him.
Chapter One
Aria
“Hello, miss. This is Officer Gordon Badiou calling from the Les Eaux Police Department. I would like to discuss information regarding the disappearance of Xuan Giang Nguyen. Please call me back at your earliest convenience. It’s okay if it’s after hours—I understand you are busy. This number should forward any new messages to me directly.”
The officer’s voice plays in Aria’s mind, and she shakes off the gnawing anxiety caused by ignoring his voicemail. It’s the kind of call Aria’s been waiting and praying into existence for the past fourteen years. But when she heard his voice, Aria could process the information only matter-of-factly, like she was learning about some politician on TV or a stranger she’d read about online.
In this moment, Aria wants to pretend the news this officer has is innocuous, like he’s somehow found the ID card she lost in middle school. She tells herself all she needs to do is survive the day. So she hasn’t called Officer Badiou back. Instead, she continues her walk toward Kim’s Laundry and Dry Cleaning in disbelief that it’s already that time of year again.
Every year, around December especially, a bone-deep yearning returns. It’s a missing that no words can explain. It usually crushes Aria, but she can’t afford to let that happen anymore. Between school, taking care of Aunt Thu, and barely holding it together, there isn’t time to wallow. Inside the organized box in Aria’s head, she tucks away Officer Badiou’s message into the missing mom folder. Aria becomes fully numb, as she always does on the anniversary of her mother’s disappearance.
“Hey, Ari. Your dress is ready,” a voice calls from beyond the drying machines. Aria’s sitting on an orange plastic chair in a neat laundromat, looking toward the back hallway that snakes behind the stacked white coin dryers. The room is monochromatic, with white laminate floors and white painted walls. Mrs. Kim says it’s easier to keep everything clean when she can see every spot. But with the sun shining through the plastic blinds and reflecting off the colorless surfaces, everything is too bright, too pure, and too clean. Aria’s eyes hurt today.
She stands, letting her backpack fall into the plastic chair’s seat with a thud before following the voice coming from the back room. She rubs her eyes, the gritty sensation of two-day-old eyeliner smearing under her fingertips, as she turns the hallway’s corner. On the other side of the ajar red door to Mrs. Kim’s office, Philip stands with a wry smile on his face and a garment on a hanger draped over his skinny arms. He’s uncharacteristically dressed-up, wearing black slacks with a waffle-knit white button-up.
“What’s the occasion?” Aria asks, moving to take the sheathed dress hanging from his arms and lightly jabbing him with her elbow. “Do you have another blind date to go on?”
Philip smiles, the edges of his lips curling. He pauses for a second, clinging to the dress before letting it go.
“You think I’d go on a date looking like I sell insurance?”
Aria chokes out a laugh, the tension of the day and the unanswered voicemail dissolving the tiniest bit. Philip’s face finally breaks into a genuine smile, his front teeth fully exposed in the goofy way Aria adores. He leans back onto Mrs. Kim’s desk and crosses his arms.
Philip is about a head taller than Aria, making him both taller than the average Korean kid and short enough that Aria knows he still lies on his dating-app profiles. His black hair is lightly styled, ear length and falling away from his face to expose a tanned forehead. Staring at his pouting lips and hooded dark brown eyes, Aria can’t help thinking of the girls in high school who’d squeal about how much he looked like their favorite drama actor. Suddenly it dawns on her that all the ramen bags in her house have this specific actor’s face on them, and the realization makes her cheeks heat up. Is she subconsciously surrounding herself with different iterations of Philip?
“No? Then dare I inquire if you have a job interview? Or a college interview?” Aria says, averting her eyes and pretending to scan the length of the dress in her arms.
“Aria, stop with that,” Philip says.
“Stop what? Encouraging my terribly talented but devastatingly unambitious best friend to quit being afraid of success?”
Aria silently applauds herself for diverting Philip’s attention away from her blushing face. The second allows her to get her bearings, and she sneaks a glance back up at him. His gaze is fixed at a spot on the wall, his eyes downcast and lips held taut.
“I mean it, Philip. I don’t get it.” Seriously. Aria doesn’t get it, but she has a suspicion of where he’s coming from.
Philip’s dad abandoned his family when Philip was barely standing on two wobbly legs. On occasion, Aria catches Philip searching for news about Gabriel Kim’s latest Silicon Valley successes (she does her part by pretending not to notice).
Aria knows that Mrs. Kim keeps her brother—Philip’s father—abreast of Philip’s life through sporadic voicemails. As far as Aria knows, Philip’s father has never returned a call.
She wondered what Mr. Kim would think if he heard that Philip and his childhood best friend both got into Georgetown. Though Aria had been the only one at first-year orientation because Philip declined his hard-earned spot, claiming he had to keep handling things for his aunt Mrs. Kim (the business of the laundromat and the business of keeping her company). Philip had told his aunt he didn’t get accepted and begged Aria to maintain the lie.
