First published in Prose Online, June 2022
You were a child when you first found the spring. The woods were lovely and deep in those days. The trees grew at strange angles and coiled around each other like serpents, cool and rough to the touch. Roots slithered. Great boulders sat complacent, sunken halfway into antediluvian loam, shrouded in blankets of spongy moss. You imagined they were the gods, guardians, monsters of an older world. Ossified remains, eroded beyond recognition. The weathered bones of an unremembered age.
The spring bubbled in a gentle hollow. It was autumn, and yellow leaves had fallen all around. The pool was dark, roundish; surrounded by the golden carpet, it looked to you like an eye. An owl or an eagle. A keen predator eye. Sunlight played through the branches that towered overhead, those limbs imitating a vaulted ceiling, remembering the shape of a church, a temple, a shrine that was no longer there. The structure whose ghost they reclined their naked arms on, you thought, must have crumbled when the world was still young.
As you shuffled your feet through the leaves, remembering the warnings of your parents not to play near deep water, remembering the stories of faeries and water goblins that drag unsuspecting children to their doom, your sneakered toe struck a hard object. You thought it was a stick, and crouched to clear the leaves, uncovering a long bone.
Your child-mind felt revulsion, associating this relic with the unthinkable finality of death, rather than of a life once lived—a life as real as your own. You could not yet grasp the significance of memory and experience, of how stories woven by a life reign supreme over the meaninglessness of the opposite. You leapt back, eyeing the thing on the ground. It was perhaps a femur, not that you could be expected to know at such an age. When you saw it was dry, old, completely fleshless, without the traces of rot that could bombard your psyche with the inevitability of your own future demise, you approached again in curiosity.
With your little feet, you kicked away more leaves, finding more bones beneath them. You told yourself they were the remains of an animal, perhaps one that came to drink at the spring, not because you were unable to guess that they were human, but because a part of you fought to hold onto innocence, hugging it greedily as the world plucked it away little by little.
With a scattering of old bones before you, some bearing patches of lichen and moss, reminding you of the slumbering boulders, you cautiously approached the edge of the spring. Your disturbance of the leaves had corrupted that owl iris, and only the dark pupil remained intact. The surface of the pool burbled softly with the force of the underground stream that fed it. The rippling made it difficult to see far into its depths, but there appeared to be something down there, slightly lighter in tone than the stygian gloom of the water. You looked harder, on hands and knees, leaning in as far as you dared, challenging the existence of those supernatural creatures that ensnare foolhardy children.
You saw something else in those murmuring ripples, as they warped and spliced your line of sight. Your face was warped as well, details shifting, until it seemed only the reflection of your eyes remained unchanged.
You covered your ears as your mother and father yelled.
Crash of thrown objects. Tinkling fragments of glass.
Would they hurt each other, you wondered, or was it just words?
Your face in the pool crumpled in helplessness.
You crawled backward, wanting to be away from the water. The bones rolled beneath your knees and hands. You felt a creeping sense of guilt, as though you could be blamed for those bones, for taking the life of the one to whom they’d belonged. They weren’t meant to be here. They wanted to be in the spring. You rose and kicked them all into the water, watching them disappear below the surface with a plop, swallowed up.
You departed at a fast walk, refusing to run. You felt that raptor eye upon you and didn’t want to excite its attention.
***
In the 5th century BC, Herodotus wrote of the kingdom of Macrobia, located in the Horn of Africa. Thriving chiefly on a diet of milk and boiled meat, the Macrobians had cultivated a wealthy regional powerhouse. Among its populace, skilled craftsmen, warriors, and seafarers operated under the governance of an elected monarch. The men were, according to the historian, the tallest and most handsome in the world, and indeed this legendary people were renowned for their physical vitality, beauty, size, and longevity, often living for upwards of 120 years.
Concerning this last point, Herodotus made mention of a mysterious spring in that land, which produced a fragrance like that of violets. When people bathed in it, they emerged with glossy skin, reminiscent of having been immersed in oil—yet on the contrary, the water was so pure that nothing, of any weight, could be seen to float in it: all sank to the bottom. Herodotus hypothesized that the Macrobians’ regular use of these waters was the cause of their exceptionally long lives.
***
You were a teenager when you next came to the spring. You’d searched for it for weeks, trying to retrace your wandering childhood steps, remembering which woods you were in during the halcyon period that ended shortly after your discovery of that pool. You could picture the hollow, though nowhere could you seem to find it.
The forest was much smaller now, bordered by farmers’ fields and construction sites, divided by a highway to the north. You were sure these things weren’t there before, or at least not in such profusion. You believed that the borders were once defined only by natural geography, mountains and rivers and plains that had been there since the first saplings rose from the earth in this place.
You only found the spring when you expanded your search to where you didn’t imagine it could be. The swath of clear-cut land, gray with dead brush and discarded branches, was unrecognizable. Intuition told you to pick your way through it, and when the slope of the ground bore faint hints of the old hollow, you let your feet guide you.
The spring muttered its secrets of subterranean rivers. Even blasted by the sun, from which no vault of branches stretched to offer reprieve, the waters of that hole contained inky depths. There were no leaves around it, only mud and woody detritus left over from when the great trunks were stripped and carried away as logs.
You went to your hands and knees, not caring about the mud, and peered into the water as you once did. The soft upward current that disrupted the surface, never allowing it to be placid, obscured the lighter-toned matter deep within, just as you remembered from all those years ago. Your focus returned to your face, which was being reshaped by the ripples and bubbles, and you reared back in alarm.
When you were a child, you lost yourself in the distortion. You saw a different face, with your eyes. You’d come to realize, however, that it had been your own face all along—as you now were. The spring had hinted to you of what was to come before you reached this age.
Your parents yelling. The fights. Objects thrown and smashed.
It started, as you remember, at the onset of winter, when the phantom sensation of those bones against the toes of your sneakers, as you kicked them into that very pool, was still vivid.
You hadn’t understood it, but it was something about your parents losing money, even though you were already poor then.
We’ll figure this out.
Not ‘we.’ I’m going to my brother’s.
Why?
‘Cause I’m not living on the streets with you.
How can you say that?
Because it’s you—YOU—who bought into that stupid scheme! Threw everything away!
There were supposed to be monthly returns. We were fucking conned. I was just trying to get enou—
You have no one to blame but yourself.
Blame the bastards that ran off with the money!
Well they’re not here, are they? You are.
The house was repossessed. You moved with your mother to your uncle’s home, in another part of the county. You still got to see your father sometimes after that, at first at his dingy apartment, with the old box television and its carpet smelling of cigarettes and fungi, then later at a café, where you watched your mother pay for his coffee and food. By then a cloud of body odor hung around him, and he’d grown a beard. His hair was long and unkempt, showing gray for the first time. His clothes were dirty and had rips and tears. You hugged him anyway, while your mother looked away. Eventually you didn’t get taken to the café to see him anymore. Your mother said he probably moved away to start a new job, but that he loved you.
You stood now, cautious, and stepped forth to the edge of the spring. In the reflection you saw your entire body distorted, your legs largest due to their proximity to the surface, all of you tapering toward your head.
You were lanky and gross; somehow asymmetrical, uncoordinated. Dark hair had sprouted on your body where there was no hair before. You stunk if you missed showering for a single day, especially under your arms. You detested yourself. You felt the detest of others as well, especially your peers from the underfunded, ambitionless joke of a school where you battled through your days. Your mind was cyclonic with impassioned urges beyond your control or fathoming: love, fight, hate, mate, cry, laugh, scream.
You stared at yourself, face pocked and diseased looking from the inflamed pustules of severe acne, perhaps brought on by the instant noodles, packaged cookies, and other junk food you subsisted on, or perhaps the result of mere hormonal fate, another short straw drawn in the genetic lottery. You were dressed in ill-fitting second-hand clothes, too baggy or too tight, that a stranger threw in a bin for the less fortunate in some affluent corner of a distant city.
In the waters you changed. The acne appeared less noticeable, replaced by glints of sun. You looked bigger, better proportioned, settled into a mature form.
You were speaking to your father at the correctional facility. He was on the other side of a pane of glass. It’d been a decade since you’d seen him, but it looked like three or more had assailed his physical being. If you could turn back the clock for him, provide some magical elixir to restore his diminished body to an earlier state, return to him these years he lost to homelessness and petty crime and the walls of this infernal prison, you would. You would do anything to make things right.
***
The Fountain of Youth, possessing the ability to make the old young again (rather than just bestowing longevity), is commonly held to be a Eurasian myth, derived from the folklore of various ethnic cultures. One of the earliest records of such age-reversing waters is found in the Romance of Alexander the Great.
The medieval French version of the epic, Roman d’Alexandre, tells of Alexander and his party riding through a hellish hinterland into a verdant new country, abundant with lush meadows and beautiful flowers, where they encountered some wizened men and were led to a fountain of local renown. Alexander’s old warriors entered the fountain to bathe, and when they emerged their bodies were like those thirty years of age, once more in their prime. Their bent and elderly hosts, too, bathed in the sweet waters, and when they returned to Alexander he was astonished at how their youth had been restored.
***
At the age of twenty-three, you located your father. He was held in a prison on the other end of the country, having been found guilty of theft and assault causing bodily harm. The prosecution had accused him of attempted murder, but security camera footage showed him swinging his baseball bat just once at the shopper who tried to stop him fleeing the store. He claimed to barely remember anything, heavily under the influence of narcotics at the time of the incident.
The cost of the trip took everything left in your bank account. You still had no savings. Having strived for higher education, in fact, you were already deep in debt.
How did it come to this? you asked him from your side of the glass.
I don’t know. His bottom lip trembled. Don’t know anything anymore…
You’d never in your life seen him cry until that moment. He looked vulnerable, frail, used up. He had the skin of an octogenarian. What remained of his hair was completely white. His eyes were sunken so deep, and the flesh so thin over the hinge of his jaw, that you were able to envision the skull behind his face.
It was that thing with the money, you said, not posing it as a question. Whatever made us lose the house. Mom never said much, but I know it was some scheme you got involved in.
Your father winced and wiped a forearm across his eyes, frowning with so much pain and regret that you felt your stomach knot. He cleared his throat.
Thought it was all legitimate, regulated or something. I never had much, really. Your mom neither. Just wanted to make an investment for you.
He kept his eyes down, maybe ashamed of his foolishness and naivety, or of the years of struggle, of barely scraping by, that he condemned you and your mother to. Or both.
Was for your future. Thought that a couple years down the road, once I’d made back the initial investment…
Dad, you said quietly, yet as casually as you could manage, aware of the correctional officer sitting three chairs down. Give me a name.
He told you.
***
First appearing in the 12th century, the apocryphal Letter of Prester John spread throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. Filled with wonders, among them tales of magic and exotic abundance, the people of that continent marveled at its descriptions. An embellishment of the Letter in the 13th century told of an island in the extreme meridian of the world, on which was located a spring of miraculous properties. The people of the island drank from the waters of this spring to renew their youth.
Time wore on, and more ships sent sail for distant shores. With the location of the wondrous island claimed to be somewhere along the world’s most distant line of longitude, it would indicate, to the imagination of Europeans, that it might lie among the islands of the New World reached by Columbus.
Peter Martyr, an Italian historian serving Spain, was committed to interviewing the returning explorers from the New World (including the infamous Ponce de Leon) in order to compose a history of the West Indies. In Decades of the New World, an anthology of letters and reports from these voyages to Central and South America, he wrote of an island called Boinca which was, according to him, renowned for a spring whose mysterious waters restored youth to the old. Martyr was giving an account of the voyage of Juan de Solis, and associated navigational data points to the location of Boinca being in the Gulf of Honduras.
***
It had been ten years since your last visit to the spring, though unlike when you were a teen, steering through the violent storms of adolescence, you remembered just where to find it. Still, the land had changed again. That clear-cut scar across the forest, that waste of stumps and deadwood, had seen a decade of renewal.
Young trees stood three, four, five times your height. Saplings abounded in the remaining spaces where there was enough sunlight to feed them. All grew straight, unlike those that populated the woods of old, not yet leaning over to whisper secrets of the wild to each other, not yet coiled or twisted by the unknown forces that ran deep through the ground below; their curious roots hadn’t burrowed far enough to reach that primordial strata. The mammoth boulders, their moss burnt away when the canopy was stolen, were reclaiming thin shawls of emerald in the newfound shade.
The spring dreamed in the hollow, singing stories to itself that no man or woman or child could understand, or repeat, or hear as they were. New water bulged at the surface as it always had, released from its earthen pressure and funneled upward, burbling incomprehensibly, manipulating light to obscure from human eyes what lay below.
You were ready this time, to see what it wanted to show you. This is what you had come for.
You sat cross-legged at its edge, resting your elbows on your knees to lean forward, staring at your face upon the water. For a long time you watched your distorted visage, feeling nothing.
Then, gradually, your reflection appeared to be pulled into a scowl, full of malice. You blinked and it became neutral again, dispassionate, waiting. You breathed slowly, seeing only those waters, open to what would come. The woods fell silent and your glower returned. You knew only the spring, and for the first and last time it showed you two opposing futures, overlapping like ripples that meet in a pond, coiling like the strange trees that once lived there, twining around each other, as yet inseparable because neither had been initiated—and, you could not have known, never would be.
Told you I’d put your back against a fucking wall.
The man was framed not by a true wall, but the side of a boulder, one that grew spotty patches of moss. His eyes were wide with terror in the gloom of dusk, red from crying. He reeked of piss, wet stains running down his pant legs, which meant your trunk probably reeked too. You hoped his sphincter would let go—a final indignity before you sent a bullet through his brain.
P-p-please, he begged, bringing his shaking hands together in a praying gesture as he let loose a wail, like a child throwing a tantrum. Oh guh-gawwwd…
He was regressing, back to those early years when the world was safer, before he became who he was, before you decided he didn’t deserve to exist a day longer than he had. You relished his fear, his helplessness.
You went back to finish your last year of school. You graduated and got a piece of parchment, complete with a seal, purporting to tell the world what you knew.
The economy was awful, unemployment rife. You worked in a fast-food restaurant, arms and hands polka-dotted with grease burns from the fryer. Customers sneered and yelled. You did that for a year before acquiring a corporate entry-level position, hired by one of the dozens of drab companies you desperately applied to through online portals, and moved cross-country to another city, where you put most of your savings into getting a little apartment you’d never be able to afford without the salary they promised you. You threw yourself into your work.
You spoke his name when he shrank down to the base of the boulder, hiding his face in hands. The name your father gave you. The name of the man who thought nothing for the lives of his victims as he waltzed away with their money, delighted and smug in his greed, feeling entitled to his spoils. Dog eat dog.
He looked up at you, cheeks streaked with fresh tears.
I can pay him back what I took. Or pay you. As much as you want. Everything!
Not a chance, you told him, your face twisted involuntarily into that scowl once more. You’ve had your life in the sun. Your luxuries. I know all about you. You danced around on top of the world while my family fell apart, while my dad slept on the ground, while he starved. He aged twice as fast as he should’ve. Just a broken old man—youth to decrepitude, no prime.
You disengaged the pistol’s safety.
What you stole is irreplaceable.
You paid back your loans little by little as the years passed. You put aside a bit of your salary whenever you could manage.
You found premature gray hairs just after your thirtieth birthday. You frowned at them, noticing the wrinkles that sprang from the corners of your eyes. Years of squinting at monitors, often in your darkened apartment, meeting project deadlines before allowing yourself to sleep.
The following year, your father was released from prison. You were there to pick him up in a rental car. You told him he needed a vacation, then dipped into your savings to properly welcome him back to freedom. You told him not to worry about anything, that he could come stay with you as long as he needed, until he got back on his feet.
You were caught on security cams! shrieked the man, in his final extremity of desperation. They’ve got tracker dogs!
No one’s going to find you, you said, shaking your head. Not where you’re going.
He tried to say more, but it was just nonsense in your ears. You watched his stunned eyes as you fired a single round, making sure you were the last thing that creature—that vampire—ever saw.
Vitality crept back into your father’s face. He started going for light jogs in the morning. He kept his beard trimmed and got a decent haircut. It wasn’t easy housing two people in your little one-bedroom, but you slept on the sofa and managed. You watched movies together in the evening. You joked and laughed. He applied for jobs, and finally got one at a grocery store, with a package that included health insurance. That day was the happiest you’d seen him since you were just a little kid, horsing around with him and your mother on the living room floor.
You were an idiot to think you could get away with it. Your tracks weren’t well covered. Within a few days, K-9s led searchers through the forest, right to the spring. You were already being held as a suspect.
Tell us, said the interrogating officer. Is he down there?
Yes, you choked out.
That was all they needed.
As you approached middle age, starting your own family at last, you reflected that your life hadn’t been glamorous up to this point, but it had been worthy.
Your father was in his own place, self-sufficient. He and your mother were congenial at the wedding, and they performed the silly old chicken dance together with your new life partner and the guests, all laughing at the absurdity until they were red in the face. He had to stop early just to catch his breath.
You were tipsy. Everyone was tipsy, drunk, high on ideals and the fleeting celebration of romantic union that kindles something in the highest aspirations of the human soul, whether or not that love is destined to last into the depths of an unforeseeable future. In that moment, and afterward, you felt in your heart the strength to forgive the world. And you did.
They sent a diver down to retrieve the body, then dredged the spring. Tore up its sides with shovels for better access, muddying the waters, scraping its walls and dislodging stones as far down as their equipment would reach. Though it was kept from the media, you were read the report about the skeletons as part of your questioning. Dozens of them, mingled together in layers that went down no one knew how deep. They’d brought up calcified human skulls and other bones that were estimated to be thousands of years old.
From what you heard in prison, once you were locked up, the spring had been made into a restricted archaeological site.
And you. You perished as you sat there at its edge, in your own time and place, lost in what might have been. You were consumed by the experience, the window that opened upon intertwined branches, the colliding ripples of possibility, of potentialities you were not destined, in the end, to fulfill.
Your body dehydrated as you gazed throughout the days and nights, with fresh water directly before you.
Even when your eyes were closed, you walked those two paths. You toiled and plotted and loved and killed. You saw and heard everything.
This is the Fountain of Youth. Youth comes to this place, and in this place youth perishes. So it has always been.
***
There was a fabled place, spoken of by the Arawak people of the Caribbean, called Beniny or Beimeni. Though it’s likely this referred to the ancient land of the Maya in Yucatán, its location was presumed by explorers to lie in the direction of the Bahamas. In time this land became conflated with the legends of a miraculous spring, and through either the confusion of that storied era or erroneous assertions by historians, a chain of small islands called Bimini found itself assuming, in the annals of mythos, the place of Peter Martyr’s Boinca.
Bimini is very real. Located in the Bahamas, opposite Miami, it is a far cry from the Gulf of Honduras, where the island of Boinca, and its rumored fountain that turns old men young, is fated to exist only as a written account.
***
You were a child when you came upon the spring. The trees in this part of the woods didn’t seem so old, not like those in the other areas you had wandered through. Here, rather than being hoary with lichen, or with trunks wider across than your body, the trees you passed between were narrow, their bark smooth and clear. Mossy boulders sat anchored in the earth like the last remaining dragon bones, waiting to be swallowed down into the mantle, where all traces of them would be melted away, stricken forever from history.
The spring bubbled in a gentle hollow. It was autumn, and yellow leaves had fallen all around. The water was inky, despite the cool light slanting through barren branches. It looked like a pupil, and the ring of leaves a great iris. It made you think of a bird of prey; an owl or an eagle, capable of seeing in the dark, or of observing things far away.
As you approached the pool, you noticed a mound at its edge, covered by that aureate quilt. You prodded the mound with your foot, and with a soft clatter a bone tumbled forth from beneath the leaves. You leapt back, but approached again in morbid curiosity. You cleared more of the leaves away, and to your growing horror, discovered what you knew to be a human skeleton: if nothing else, the skull was unmistakable.
Unsure what to do, and with prickles of fear running down your back, you looked around, as though some killer could have been waiting among the trees for years upon years, or was just now returning to the scene of the crime. You didn’t want to be seen with those bones. You weren’t meant to see them, you thought, or to ever be in their presence. Your proximity, here in this wild place, would link them to you in the eyes of an observer.
You kicked the bones into the pool, watching them disappear beneath its burbling black surface. You dared to look into the water only as you sent the skull rolling into it. You noticed in the depths some objects of a faintly lighter tone, and you saw, or imagined you saw, the skull settle into its place among them.
You fled from the hollow, vowing to yourself never to return to the spring, or this strange and lonely part of the forest, feeling the eye you’d corrupted watching you go.
***
Within a mangrove swamp on the shore of North Bimini is a pool called The Healing Hole. Carved naturally out of the limestone millennia ago, it’s fed by a network of tunnels through which cool water, rich in magnesium and calcium, is pumped into it by tidal action.
True to its name, some who swim in the pool purport to experience its healing qualities, or improvements in overall health. There are many places upon the earth, springs and shrines and sacred monuments, of which the same could be said.
The waters of The Healing Hole, however, do not reverse the effects of time. The pool cannot restore what has been lost. Like the spring of your youth, it merely looks forward, impregnated with minerals formed at the beginning of the world, considering only what may be.