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“Sometimes in the bath I plunge my head under the water and will the scars on my neck to open wide like mouths. Nothing. Even if I stay under until my eyes sting and my lungs burn and everything inside me feels like it’s about to burst…”
The Sea In Me is a short story about an unnamed teenage girl finding escape from the pressures of her day to day life in the swimming pool… but the pool is also a source of tension; her mother is determined to transform her into a world-class swimmer.
I was delighted when this story won the Bare Fiction Prize in 2015. It was later published on the Bare Fiction website. Bare Fiction was a (now defunct) literary magazine which published some really excellent poetry, fiction, and theatre from living, working writers.
A little later on, the story was anthologised in Best British Stories 2017, published by Salt. This annual collects the best short stories published in the small press each year.
The Sea In Me by Krishan Coupland is marked CC0 1.0. As with a lot of my short fiction, I have released this story into the public domain. This means you can use it any way you like, including making a profit from it. Let me know if you do anything interesting with it!