THE POOL
a piece of dystopian flash fiction as published in The Rebis: The Star
This time last year, I went to the library and sat down with a spiral bound notebook and a pen. The brilliant
had just announced that they were guest editing The Star edition of , founded by the incredible Hannah Levy, and I deeply wanted to be a part of it. When my hand started moving, it wasn’t an essay that started to flow, but fiction!The story of a girl—
“I went back to the pool today to have another look. At what, I’m not sure—I’m never sure—and yet for the third day in a row, I sat at the edge of the great puddle between this land and that land, peeking over its crystalline surface, like a child peering into her mother’s bathroom mirror.
Or so I would imagine. I’ve never had a mother or a bathroom mirror, only picture books from a world that no longer exists.”
Okay, so that final stanza was a later addition during edits—which was a dream process by dream editors—but overall, what is now proudly published in The Rebis: The Star was written in two longhand writing sessions and a final pass once I’d typed it up. It was a creative channeling as healing as the card itself, a bright light in an otherwise dark time in my life, and the promise of a dream come true. A hope fulfilled, and a lovely reminder of creative community and anti-capitalist art. Endless gratitude to Charlie and Hannah for saying yes to my little story of apocalyptic longing, and helping me to nurture her into something transformative!
As Pisces season, and another zodiacal year, comes to a close, I want to share this story with you in full. Perhaps you can find some peace in it, or a moment of prayer and connection with spirit, here, in the deep waters where endings meet new beginnings.
So be it, so it is. See you on the other side!
ICYMI:
🗓️: Week #12: March 17-23, 2025
🕯️: Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling w/ Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens
🎟️: NumHERology, Mixology, and Thai Gastronomy (LIVE IN LA)
💍: Marriage By the Numbers: Planning Your Wedding Using Numerology
🎧: Call Your Coven is new! Listen to Coven Chat: Out of the Broom Closet
THE REBIS: THE STAR
Edited by Hannah Levy and Charlie Claire Burgess
The Rebis is an annual tarot-themed print anthology of creative writing and art. This 114-page issue features the work of more than 30 writers, artists, and change-makers exploring themes found in The Star tarot card, including hope, inspiration, regeneration, and futurity.
ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY! 🌟 DIGITAL COPIES AVAILABLE! 🌟 SUPPORT SPIRITUAL ARTISTS! 🌟
THE POOL
by Rebecca Scolnick
As published in The Rebis: The Star
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I went back to the pool today to have another look. At what, I’m not sure—I’m never sure—and yet for the third day in a row, I sat at the edge of the great puddle between this land and that land, peeking over its crystalline surface, like a child peering into her mother’s bathroom mirror.
Or so I would imagine. I’ve never had a mother or a bathroom mirror, only picture books from a world that no longer exists.
The ground below me was dry and cracked, its sharp slivers of rock and clay stabbing my skin as I shifted stiffly in my seat, but the sky above was heavy, full of clouds and ripe with rain. If they let go, not only would I be soaked for the long journey back, but whatever expression I might be lucky enough to see on the face of the pool would be stolen. Shattered into a million drop-shaped pieces, forever rippling towards the muddy banks.
By the grace of something undetermined, the weather held off. The thief never came.
My hands sweat a cold, clammy kind of perspiration that didn’t drip, but rather spread until it covered my palms, fingertips, and threadbare jeans. Someone once said that the pool’s magic worked better when you sat with your palms up, facing the sky—open, open, open; ready, ready, ready. But I had already tried that twice, and my faith was shaky enough to begin with. I pressed my palms to damp denim.
Waiting.
Watching.
Wishing for my Sight to take root.
Just like the pool, Sight is folklore from the old world, whispered between wives and widows. My favorite version of the story, which I overheard a few months ago while stringing linens up to dry, likened Sight to magic made real, and anyone with the gift to magicians. Oracles, once revered by kings, commanders, and common peoples alike for their wisdom and insights. I listened hungrily, my pulse quickening with an ancient awareness. But then the dinner bell rang and the ending was lost to the wind.
I never asked to hear the rest. There aren’t many in our current camp wanting to talk of those who see past this physical plane and into the center of the sky. The days of prophecy are over. Now, there’s only survival, and the hope it requires.
Still, there are those who consider Sight to be valuable.
It’s so much easier to survive when one is valuable...
In the dim light of the cloud-ridden sky, my blue-gray eyes flickered against the face of the pool. I blinked, half expecting my reflection to resist, to remain staring at me no matter how I moved. What a silly thought, to spy on the eyes themselves, when they are the ones who see. I tried to relinquish any need to know what was happening around me, dancing on the tightrope between dangerous and brave.
When the moment ended, my eyes stared back at me.
I’m told they’re my mother’s eyes, except hers showed blazing hot signs of Sight—a ring of flames around each iris. She died long before we came here, to this place where lands come together. I never knew her. I can’t remember the shape or color of her eyes any more than I can remember the sponge of her nipple between my gums. I didn’t have teeth when she died, but even if I did, teeth wouldn’t have changed what happened to her.
To us.
I wondered, in those next breaths, if it might be possible to conjure my mother’s face in the pool? If I stared hard enough, deep enough into my eyes—her eyes—and let my gaze glaze over until the rest of my features (ashy hair, pointed nose, the small bow of my lips) fuzzed, would I be able to see her? Could the glass of the ground reflect a version of her that most resembled me? Could the contours of my face shift, change, and rearrange until I could see her?
See me?
Would our likeness bring my gifts—her gifts, our gifts—to life?
Or did our magic die with her?
It seemed futile. I had no idea what I was looking for. Not after my three days at the edge of the well, and not after the twenty-nine years and three-hundred and sixty-four days that came before them. Year after year, my clock would tick, the Sun would return, but my Sight still hadn’t taken root. I was beginning to think it never would.
Today was my last chance. They say no one has ever developed Sight after thirty.
As I waited for the pool to give me my long overdue birthday present, I heard a rustling in the brush—the brittle whisper of leaves and twigs, which told the story of a spoiled sneak attack, or perhaps the arrival of an old friend.
The only problem was there was no brush. No foliage, friend, or foe.
Was it all in my head? The sound of an alarm bell in the recesses of my weary mind? Another example of my desperation for something more? Something grounded? Something real? Something of the Earth I still inhabited, as I waited for something of the sky above? Or perhaps the noise was a trick of the sky itself, and the shapeshifting spirits that occupy its vast expanse...
Whatever the case, it rattled my spirit.
My right eye twitched as I turned back towards the pool.
Soon, dusk would creep over the fields like the clouds over the sun—ruinous and concealing. I needed to leave soon.
I stared harder, a prayer forming in my mouth, hot against my tongue:
Please. Please. I am so tired.
Please. Please. I’ve come so far.
Please. Please. I need a sign.
Please. Please. I am trying so hard.
I repeated it over and over, until the rhyme delighted the parts of me that could still feel awe. Wonder and joy. I was reminded of long ago—at least three or four settlements back—when I would scrub the dishes after mealtime, making up little songs as the soap slipped through my fingers. The plates always felt so heavy in my hands, but precious. I dropped one once and cried over the pieces, hoping my tears might fill the cracks and hold like glue.
But water and salt can’t repair ceramic and no one has had glue for years.
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I let my mind flood with memory, with the last remnants of a time gone by. A way of life that had met an unceremonious end. Perhaps it was for the best? Nature’s way of accounting for a species that had outgrown its place in the cycle of things. Human beings had long forgotten how to multiply without possessing, how to progress without pillaging, how to appreciate without fleecing the joint.
The encampment where I was tasked with doing dishes had been safe for a while. It was far enough away from the center of the war that took my mother—that tried to take me too—and run by people who viewed themselves as stewards of Life, rather than masters of Death. When I was old enough to understand things, I would sit and listen to the elders speak. They held meetings nightly, right in the center of the camp, where they shared directives for the present, and visions for the future to any who would listen. Someone once said it reminded them of a “quad” on a “college campus,” but those words were strange to most and didn’t elicit the desired response.
Even then, and even though I didn’t have the proper language to express the thought, I wondered what it meant for a future if the people who survived could no longer share points of reference. I supposed it had always been that way—different cultures held different traditions and whatnot—but before the war, there had been many means for communication. For sharing, for exchange. For travel, too. Before the war, there were “airplanes,” big metal birds that could carry crowds from one country to another, and “trains,” cylindrical carriages that raced across the land like steel snakes.
Now, there was only the land you slept on and the people who helped you make your bed.
I gazed across the border, surveying where this land slipped into that land. It didn’t look any different to me, but what did I know? I was just a pithy human girl, sitting day after day by a puddle that wouldn’t talk back. Just a frilly little thing, who still clung to stories of hope and magic, of muses and oracles. Of the old ways that fell to new ways, until the new ways fell, too.
Please. Please. I am so tired.
Please. Please. I’ve come so far.
Please. Please. I need a sign.
Please. Please. I am trying so hard.
It was time to give up.
Go back.
Surrender to reality, whatever that means.
(Maybe “reality” was only understood on the “quads” of “college campuses.”)
Perhaps I would never develop my Sight—never see my mother, or anyone else, in the face of the pool. That would be okay, I thought. I had other skills, a willingness to learn, and a desire to live. That was worth more than some inconsistent ability one could be killed for having.
I looked back into the pool for a final time and took a deep breath.
It stared back at me, placid and peaceful.
But then—
The water began to ripple, motion spreading like the sweat on my down-turned palms, and an image coalesced: A spiral, wide and wiry, spinning into a cyclone.
It made me dizzy, made my stomach churn. My vision oscillated between pinpoint sharp and a total blur. I gripped my thighs and tried to hold on.
When the storm settled, it was as if the Hand of some Unknown God had smoothed out the surface of the pool, revealing a dark sky scattered with a thousand tiny diamonds.
My chest was tight, but my nerves stayed calm.
In the center of the watery void was a star shining brighter than the rest, shoving itself forward in the landscape. It was mesmerizing, drawing me to reach my hand towards the liquid barrier. What would its glowing light feel like under my fingertips? Would the connection between us seep up into my arms and move throughout my body? Would I glitter just as brilliantly?
Before my fingertips could touch the surface, I felt it: the stars, gathered in between my ribs, burning like a great ball of fire. I felt as if I might break apart—a divine cleaving down the middle in two perfect halves. Images danced across my mind, of people and places, familiar and foreign, teemed with a knowledge that was intimately mine, yet belonged to no one at all. Where my breasts once blazed, was the cool dampness of dirt, packed and planted. The long-forgotten fertility of the Earth.
Hark! What is this strange spell?
My mother’s hand pierced through the veil. Disembodied, yet resoundingly her. I climbed inside her cupped palm and stroked my cheek against her soft skin. She cradled me in stardust, whispering in the conch shell of my ear with a voice so smooth it threatened to lull me to sleep. The flame in my chest flickered from an unwieldy blaze to a steadfast beam, soothed by her touch. Her warmth. Her presence.
Finally, we were together. There, in the pool; in the Whole.
I opened my mouth to speak, but words—air, expression, breath—caught in my throat. Instead, I let myself rest, pressing my face to the carved rivers of her weathered hand. Who could say how long we had to be together?
And yet I knew, for the first time in my life, that we were always together. We would always be together.
We are connected in the Whole.
I am the Whole.
I am her. I am me. I am yet to be.
Before I was ready to leave her—as if I could ever be ready to leave her—I was spat out, barreling through time and space until I hit the hard ground of this land.
(That land. Every land. Just land.)
I had not moved; I was sitting in the same spot as before the current had dragged me asunder. The pool was still and my palms were dry. The clouds still filled the sky. But when I peered into the looking glass, the dull gray of my eyes was ringed with orange and red.
I gave thanks to the pool, to the sky, to the land, and to my mother. I asked them to keep me safe as I took my first steps as someone new, and to guide me as I explored these new gifts.
My belongings packed, I walked towards the border of this land and that land. As I suspected, there was no demarcation. No difference.
Nothing, and everything, had changed.
I had a mother now. A mirror, too.
I could See.
I made my way back to camp.
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If you enjoyed the story, feel free to let me know! Your thoughts will bolster me through the finishing touches on a draft of something very different for the same publication (hint hint, wink wink: 😈)