Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

What you end up asking Thomas about is the wood. How many logs has he cut through? He gives you an answer that makes you picture your house, the log pile he stands over and cuts with his chainsaw, wearing his protective chainsaw chaps that are mesh and meant to stop the moving blade. They were bought at a discount and when he brought them home you knew why they were on sale. They are bright orange with dark spots on them and look to you like the animal-skin clothes the cartoon characters in The Flintstones wore, and you were afraid for him then, thinking how could anything that silly-looking prevent a life-threatening slice to a femoral artery? He says he is at the point in his history book where the author is discussing the Potato Famine, and you say what about the Potato Famine, and he says oh my god, the Potato Famine, but you never get to hear why the Potato Famine was anything other than what you knew from school, a blight that starved so many in Ireland, because now the national anthem has started up, and this time it’s not canned music, but a bunch of girls from the team, including your youngest, who is singing off-key into the mike. Of course, it’s a hundred times better than the canned music because it’s your daughter, Alex, and you can hear her voice amongst the others — it’s out of tune, and you love it, and wonder if you pull out your little video camera now to tape her will it be unpatriotic, and do you care? And you wonder why some put their hand over their heart when the anthem is played and why some just put their hands behind their back and why you yourself put your hand over your heart when you’re not in the least inclined to show patriotism. You’re certainly not inclined to show patriotism by having troops go off to war, and you start wondering how strange it is to live in a world where so much of what other people do and what your government’s doing is something you wouldn’t do at all, and it makes the living you’re doing seem as if it isn’t living at all, at least not in the big sense, only in a small sense, in the way the goose you have at home lives, knowing only what’s in the immediate area, not thinking beyond the fox by the pond and the hawk up above. You wish you could think of the bigger picture sometimes, how to come up with a solution to poverty, the dilemma of thinning ozone, the inevitable threat of worldwide drought, and not always be concerned whether the swim towels you washed can come completely dry in a forty-minute cycle or do they need sixty. Not always concerned whether the swimsuit you bought online could have been purchased for less on a different site. Not always concerned that if you hadn’t let your daughter go to the public library a week ago during story time when all the preschoolers were entering the building, then she wouldn’t have caught a cold and had to miss three swim practices in a row, possibly causing her not to be at the height of her conditioning now. Not always concerned about the fact that Thomas never touches you, and that maybe it really doesn’t matter. Like you said, there’s no blame, there’s just the next morning with his body taking up your side of the bed, and you being pushed closer to the edge of the bed, where there’s a gap almost wide enough for your body to fall through, and if it did you’d hit cobwebs, dead flies, balls of dog hair, and books you started but never finished, and maybe you’d be sucked down even farther, into that void where the horrors of everyday life swim around in some primordial stew you could never pull yourself up and out of.

T his is weeks later. This is how the summer has been passing, with you thinking about Paul, and taking the girls to swim practice, and sometimes seeing Paul at the facility and talking with him, and Thomas still not touching you, and you thinking about Paul even more. This is the air filled with the scent of the knee-high grown mint. This is your stream, lower now than in the spring, bordered by baneberry and pink lady-slipper, the flowers past bloom but the leaves full. This is your road in front of your house hardly visible through the hanging vines of the Spanish moss tree and the leaves of the tupelo and the old hemlock blocking the view and the sounds of passing cars. These are the storm clouds gathering from the south, sitting over the pond heavy with algae the color of forsythia and thick with tadpoles about to grow legs, turning the surface water dark gray.

This is you at a wedding, taking pictures of the bride, trying not to take a picture when she’s swatting at the mosquitoes feasting on her bare arms. This is you remembering your own wedding with Thomas, when he grabbed you by the arm right before you said the vows, holding up his index finger to everyone seated, letting them know he just wanted a moment. Then he took you back behind the barn on the property where you were married. “What? What?” you said, wanting to know what was going on and seeing your white shoes disappearing into grass that hadn’t been mowed because no one expected anyone from the wedding party to be walking around there next to the old barn boards, a rusted tractor, and the rock foundation. What was wrong? Did he want to stop the wedding? He kissed you there. It was a long kiss, as if he had all the time in the world, and there weren’t one hundred people waiting for the both of you and wondering what had happened. When he was done, he said, “That’s the real kiss I want to give you. It won’t be the same in front of all of those people. Remember this kiss when we’re old and gray,” he said, and then he grabbed your hand again and the two of you ran back up to where the judge was and you stood in front of him. Everyone seated cheered then. You knew you were married at that moment, saying the vows wasn’t even necessary. Now this is you thinking how one of the grooms looks like your brother. He’s got the same eyes that appear half asleep. The groom is probably high, you think, and then of course you start thinking about your brother, and about how he shot himself, about how the blood… You can feel yourself slipping into thinking about him. It’s almost as if you’re ducking in through a door with a sign on the front that says “Dead Brother Door.” You are relieved when you realize there’s a way not to think about him. All you have to do is think about Paul instead. This is you looking at the road every few seconds, thinking you’ll see Paul driving by because the wedding is not far from Paul and Chris’s house. This is you missing the chance to take a photo of the groom having his lapel straightened by his mother because you are too busy looking at the road. This is you also missing the chance to take a photo of the bride hugging all three of her bridesmaids at once — they’re huddled together like teammates about to break into a cheer — because you think you actually do see Paul at the wedding, with his ponytail hanging down, and with his back facing you as he’s getting a drink. You know it would be highly coincidental if he were at this wedding, but just maybe he is. You run up to him, and then almost drop your camera when he turns around and is somebody else, somebody with large nostrils and a deeply receding hairline. He doesn’t have the thick hair Paul has, or the fine aquiline nose. This is you later, leaving the wedding in the dark while the father of the bride sets off celebratory fireworks in a field. You consider driving to Paul and Chris’s just to look in the window and see if he’s there, but when you look down at yourself, in the glow of an especially large display of palm and willow fireworks with bursting light that falls in tendrils, you see that your dress is rumpled, your sandaled feet covered in bits of grass wet with dew, and your hair is hanging in strands about your face like drooping antennae. This is you deciding that if you did drive to his house, on the pretense of saying hello to Chris, and he was there by himself, you’d be too embarrassed about the way you look to talk to him. You wouldn’t even get out of the car. You’d drive away and he’d think you were stalking him, which, of course, you probably would be.