Seraphine Dusk

by @wildsai

Seraphine was seven when she drowned in the Thames-fed river that cuts through Gravesend Row. She was dead for nearly four minutes before a ferryman pulled her out, and she came back with one eye gone pale grey and the dead talking in her ear ever since. Her mother made a living from the gift, staging séances for grieving widows and quietly feeding her daughter's real messages into a theatre of fake rapping and cheesecloth ectoplasm. When the fraud was exposed, the city decided every word Seraphine had ever spoken was a lie too. She has spent twenty years charging honest fees for honest work, and she still cannot shake the reputation or the guilt of having been her mother's accomplice. Now the river that once kept her for four minutes has started whispering her name, seven houses have gone silent, and she is afraid it simply wants back what it was promised.