C10 The Old Well

The well in our backyard is magical. Every time I kill and throw the body in there, it would disappear overnight. But mother’s body had been in there for days now, still not disappearing.

I first discovered the well’s secret when I was fourteen. My father had become unbearable—drunk every night, fists flying at anyone who looked at him wrong. One evening he came home raging about dinner being cold. He slapped my mother so hard she hit the kitchen counter and didn’t get up. Something inside me snapped. I waited until he passed out on the couch, then took the old hunting knife from the shed.

The blade went in easier than I expected. He barely made a sound. Dragging his heavy body across the yard under moonlight was the hardest part. I rolled him over the stone rim and let him drop. The splash was muffled, almost polite. By morning, the well was empty. Just dark water reflecting the sky. No body. No blood. No evidence. The magic had taken him.

After that, the well became my silent partner.

School bullies who cornered me behind the gym? Gone by sunrise. The neighbor’s dog that kept barking at night? One quick twist, splash, and silence. Even the teacher who failed me and mocked my “stupid family” in front of the class—disposed of cleanly. Each time, the well swallowed them without trace. It felt like justice. Like the universe finally balancing the scales for a boy who had suffered too much.

I grew up, moved out for a few years, but the house in the quiet corner of Kwai Tsing eventually called me back when Mother got sick. She was all I had left. Cancer, the doctors said. The same kind that had taken her own mother. I quit my job and became her full-time caregiver.

Days blurred into nights of medicine, pain, and her thin, wheezing voice calling my name. It started as a duty, but quickly curdled into resentment. She became a prisoner in her own bed, and by extension, she made me a prisoner, too. I spent my savings on morphine drips and oxygen tanks. I cleaned the sores on her back, changed her sheets while she whimpered, and endured the sickly, sweet stench of her decay. She was no longer the woman who had birthed me; she was a drain—a black hole of need that consumed my youth, my money, and my sanity.

She would look at me with these hollow, watery eyes, whispering apologies, and all I could think about was how much easier my life would be if the well just... took her. I didn’t want to be a caregiver. I wanted to be free.

Then, the final night came. The pain was too much for her, she said. She begged me to help her end it. It was the perfect excuse.

I used a pillow. Quick and quiet. No blood this time. I carried her frail body to the backyard well under a starless sky. The rope creaked as I lowered her down. She splashed softly into the water. I waited until dawn, expecting to wake up to a clean slate, to a new beginning.

But the next morning, she was still there.

Floating face-up, eyes open, staring straight at the circle of sky above. Her nightgown drifted around her like pale seaweed. The well had not taken her.

I panicked. I added weights—old bricks tied to her ankles with garden twine. Still nothing. The body remained, bobbing gently. By the third day, the smell started. Sweet and sickening, drifting up from the depths. Flies buzzed around the rim even though I kept the old wooden cover on. Every night I stared down into the well, whispering, “Take her. Please. You always take them.” But Mother’s corpse refused to vanish.

Desperate, I broke into her bedroom, intending to pack up her belongings so I could sell the house and leave this nightmare behind. I needed to find her bank books, her deeds. I started tossing out her old clothes, clearing out the closet.

That’s when I felt a loose floorboard beneath the vanity. I pried it up.

There was a heavy, leather-bound journal inside. I opened it, my heart pounding, expecting family secrets or perhaps some insurance policy.

The first page was dated twenty years ago. It was a list. Names. Father. The school bully. The dog. The teacher. Each name had a date next to it, and a small, cryptic note: “The well accepted him.”

My breath hitched. I flipped through the pages. Every single person I thought I had "rightfully" disposed of was listed here, in her handwriting, long before I had even considered the acts. She had detailed the exact times I had dragged the bodies to the yard. And then, at the bottom of the last entry, before she fell ill, she had written: “My son thinks he is the master of the dark. He is merely the delivery boy. I am the gatekeeper. The well serves me, and it hungers for my command.”

I dropped the book.

Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the windowpane. I looked out at the backyard. The well’s wooden cover was slowly sliding open, not from the wind, but from below.

The mother's body wasn't rotting. It was rising. And for the first time, I realized the well hadn't been cleaning up my messes. It had been waiting for the only person who had the authority to demand a cleanup.

The water began to churn, dark and viscous, not to take her down, but to bring her back.