David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Leah tried not to think about those years and how terrible she’d been. She hoped that some of the things she’d said were no longer remembered by anyone.

The babysitter said, “Come here,” and Leah came and sat down next to her on the floor. “Listen. Do you want to hear something terrible?” The babysitter was only five years older than Leah, but seems to be from another generation. She wore pale pink shorts over pool-tanned legs, green flip-flops on long-toed feet, a soft blue t-shirt on broad swimmer’s shoulders. Her braces gleamed.

“Listen to this. So at the lake once, I was swimming. This was a few summers ago. My parents have a place there they rent in the summer. It’s like a log cabin and there is a fireplace in the middle of the living room and we toast marshmallows, but mine always burn and get all mushy and stuff, but so, we were at the lake a few summers ago and I was swimming and I wanted to see how far out I could swim. My mom and step-dad were on the dock in folding chairs and my older brother was away with some of his friends from college or something and I was swimming alone because, see, I wanted to see if I could swim out to this thing I saw floating out in the water. It was a buoy or something, so I swam the breaststroke, because I’d just learned that for the swim team and I wanted to practice. The lake is wide there, before the last turn before the dam, so it was real far, but I wanted to make it, so I kept moving my arms and kicking. Then I got to the thing and I put my hand out and it turned and I could see that it was a person’s head and half was covered in moss and stuff and the other half was bloated and pale and green and the eyes had worms in them. I found out later that it was a guy who’d been in a boating accident.”

When you swim in the lake, strapped into your life-vest, you bob in brown-green water. You dangle over endless murk. Branches, you hope, brush your ankles. Pale shapes pass beneath you, just out of the range of vision, obscure submerged glaciers of alien fish flesh or some larking phantom. The lake is man-made. At the bottom of the lake, there were houses. Her father told her so. When you swim in the lake, slipping out of your life-vest for a moment, to dart down to the sudden cold strata of water just out of range of the sun, you are on the threshold of a frightening and serene city unseen by anyone still living, but at home, when dry and warm, you can taste that empty city in every sip of water you take from the tap.

The babysitter said, “You believe me, don’t you?” and Leah nodded and the babysitter said, “Have I ever told you that my house is haunted?”

Jacob cried and beat fists on air to follow Leah as she darted out the door to find the neighborhood boys who play football in the street on Saturday mornings. They played football in the middle of the street and threw firecrackers at passing cars and tried to knock each other off of their bicycles with bull whips purchased at the Harrod County Fair.

Sometimes the neighborhood boys let her play, but not if Jacob came. They called him names and he cried and the boys scattered in guffaws. She got angry that they wouldn’t let her play and that Jacob ruined it for her and felt terribly alone as they sauntered away, their throats full of laughter like a skull full of honey.

The neighborhood boys were much older. Two were in middle school and one could even drive a car already, or said he could. They yelled in the early summer evening and Leah could hear them from her window. They made fun of her too when she tagged along, nipping at their shadows, but she didn’t mind as long as they didn’t turn away from her. Their voices sliced summer’s monotony.

Leah couldn’t find the boys. They were not in the street. They were not at the house with the walled garden and the reflecting pool. They were not behind the house abutting the empty lot. She could hear voices somewhere, but it might have been just a radio in a passing car. She knew they were somewhere on the street. She tilted up her ears and listened for them.

Somewhere, they pitched rocks, called names, cursed soft curses to each other. Their faces glistened in the sunlight and eyes flamed at the words cock pussy slut balls titties shit motherfucker shit shit.

An egg, hidden and forgotten at Easter, started to smell. The Devil is in my closet . Leah curled in the corner of her bed, staring at the closet door. When she went to the bathroom to bathe before bed, the door had been closed. When she returned, it was open. In the dark, she could feel cold air blowing against her face like faint breath. She’d been a bad sister and this was her punishment. The Devil and Hell and pain for ever and ever. A voice called her name from the closet. A voice whispered help .

At school, she had no friends. Her round face and her wiry hair and her slightly too small eyes and her stooping gait conspired to leave her outside the circle of voices on the playground. The school year passed and she had little that she remembered about it later on except for the TRS-80 computer that the school put in the library, on which she played simple games, green lines on a black field. And then a summer passed and a school year passed and still, little happened to her that she would remember. On the playground during recess, sitting alone, she carved her name into the wood of the log cabin with a pair of scissors that she’d spirited out in her skirt. Pale letters in dark, wet wood. Her purchase of eternity.

One evening as she left work, Leah Shepherd wondered if her name was still there, carved in the wood of the playground of the old elementary school. She parked on the street and started across the school yard toward the playground, but seeing a group of children playing unsupervised after school, she felt uncomfortable and left. They watched her go and laughed from the top of the jungle gym.

“Between her legs. Lots of bald heads been there,” he said and laughed. He pulled his shirt up and picked at tangled hairs. He’d replaced his eyes with marbles and his teeth with gravel. He shot at the sky and night died finding the Earth new in new light.

She just needed a little help until her job started paying. Leah listened to her story, signed papers and watching the woman walk outside the conference room window, she lost the train of conversation.

Thin sticks found on the ground after thunderstorms were the scourge of summer. Her clothes scattered among the roots and rocks. She took cover under an overpass. The phloem and xylem inside still tender. Rough bark abrading young skin. Still tender. Still young. Young gods die young. The palace beyond this world rotting even as it is born. Young die young. Accumulate, fade, emptiness and an evening of rain with no thunder. Just static. A woman gathered her clothes when it was over, after the man had gone, leaving behind a cloud of his breath, her clothes dried on the cement.

Leah was startled by the telephone’s trill and the voice that came with it, asking for just a little help and Leah looked deep into the spreadsheets to find it.

Leah couldn’t remember when she first saw the man. In her earliest memory of him, something which barely even counted as a memory, something which was little more than a faintly colored feeling, something without image or sound or words to describe it, an electrical impulse that rushed through her mind that she might call a memory, but which was some more elemental and ancient relative, some sooty palm print on a cave wall, in this she remembered recognizing him, which means that she’d seen him before, but she could not remember when or from where. This is how it was when she, in bed in the dark, sought her earliest impressions, nested in the most distant fold of her memory, something inconsequential — putting on a shoe on a step or the muted swirls in the tarnished silver of the hutch in the dining room — but there was always a day before that that she had lived and the sense that there was a whole world and life just beyond. She had the same feeling when she read the Book of Genesis. There is always something that came before, something forgotten. Fragments reflecting some earlier tale, now long lost. In bed she sought those old shards, suffocated under years of nonprofit tax regulations and names of acquaintances and television episodes, and when she thought of that man, she wondered if she’d really seen anyone at all.