The clamour has relented, gifts tucked away safely for future collection. My colleagues in the force have ribbed me all night long, and so they should. We have now gone our separate ways. I’ve let my retirement wash over me, knowing that after all the whisky and sentiment, I’d have one last call to make. One last stop.

So, warrant card handed back to my Chief Super, I make my way down to the river, down past the Broomielaw. There she abides, waiting for me even as she flows. The Clyde knows I owe her a debt, and she has been patient.

Now, after all these years, it is time to face the dread of that terrible day. That day when I was a young officer who failed to do his duty. As I stumble down the walkway, the heat of the whisky evaporates like the angel’s share, and a long chill settles deep in my bones.

I know my boys will be here. I know I must ask their forgiveness.

I come to rest, though knowing I will never rest, leaning against the barriers. The river runs below me with the silence of a hunter.

“I’m here, boys!”

I cry, and my eyes mist over like the dew of the deepest night. I think back to when I first saw my boys. How young I was, how cowardly. I am ashamed.

I raise my weary head. On the bank facing me, I see my boys standing side by side in grim vigil. They have kept their unspoken promise. The one I knew they must have made even as their chests heaved, as their lungs burst. To call out to the devil as the waters filled their throats, and have him rightly curse me.

They glare at me, their skin an awful, permeable green. They are still children, though it has been thirty years since I failed to save them when they fell in the river. Thirty years since I was too weak and scared of the waters to jump after two misadventuring brothers. They were just two young boys, all of eleven and eight.

“I’m so sorry… I wasn’t brave enough to save you, boys,” I plea, my hands before me in prayer, my head bowed.

I look across the dark waters again, and the bank across the way is bereft, desolate, and unforgiving. The two drowned brothers are gone. I wonder, have they returned to the awful watery afterlife they inhabit?

I rub my face and eyes. I offer another apology and turn away, heading back up to the Broomielaw.

There is no rain. Yet, I hear a thrum of water hitting the streets around me. I shriek, realising that my drowned boys are next to me. They are dripping wet. The water, grey, dank and acrid, pools at their bare little feet, as droplets splash from their lank, thinning hair and from their ghastly, brittle fingers.

They are next to me, and I can smell the necrosis; I taste it on my tongue. “I’m so sorry, boys, please forgive me. I was a coward. I was too scared to save you,” I wail.

They are next to me, and the younger brother, skin barely attached to his face, looks to the older. It is a look of confusion, a look that breaks me. Even now, after all these years, this spirit remnant of that little boy looks to his brother to try to explain what has happened to them both. The older brother has no answer to offer his sibling. Instead, he blazes at me with milky, marbled eyes, and nods. We are yours, now.

I never married. I never had children of my own.

But I’ll always have my boys. My poor, drowned boys. They are next to me as I walk on. They always have been. They always will be.

---

JS Apsley is a noir and mystery author from Glasgow, Scotland. He won the Ringwood Publishing 2024 short story prize and has gone on to place over thirty stories in 2025 so far. See http://www.jsapsley.com.