Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

During the day, out your window, you can hear what must be tree limbs rubbing against one another in the wind and squeaking, but it sounds like a new kind of animal, or just an animal you’ve never heard before.

In the shower, while thinking about how Paul kissed you, you keep saying “water, water, water,” imitating the boy in the wheelchair at the facility whom you often hear showering in the next stall over. Maybe the drain hears everything and Thomas has figured that out already and that’s why he does most of his talking in the shower. Someone’s listening, someone who gives him the time of day. Someone who says, “Yes, tell me more about quarks, quasars and pulsars. Tell me how we are moving away from other planets at twenty-two miles per day. Tell me how Pluto was sent off course by a stray meteor and now has a wobble.”

This is Paul asleep while Chris gets up from bed and gets dressed. He is not someone who snores, and Chris often has to go right up to him and watch his breathing in order to tell whether he’s asleep or not. She can tell he’s sleeping when his lips are slightly parted, as if he’s just about to say something, or he has just pulled away from a kiss. He is sleeping now. She knows the rest stop that Kim was killed at, and when she drives by it she can see that there are police barricades blocking the entrance road. This is Chris driving farther up the highway, liking how she has the lanes to herself, liking how she can use her brights and not have to worry about blinding an oncoming driver because there is no one else but her on the highway. This is Chris pulling into a different rest stop, farther up north, in the dark, hearing her tires make a crumbling sound over the blacktop. This is Chris going into the bathroom, where moths fly by the light above the door and where a cricket is chirping in the corner by the sink, whose pipes sweat beneath the basin. This is Chris finished in the stall, and now standing at the sink washing her hands, realizing there are no hand towels and wiping her hands on the skirt of her dress instead. This is her hand sliding over her pocket, sliding over the hard handgun she can feel beneath the cloth. This is Chris looking in the mirror, looking to see who could be standing behind her looking at her looking in the mirror, but there is no one behind her. The door is behind her and it is shut, but not all the way, and wouldn’t it be easy, Chris thinks, for someone to just open up that door and find her?

This is the moon shining down so close to the hills Chris thinks something’s wrong with Earth’s orbit or gravity, and the world is in danger of being struck by the moon. This is the picnic bench she sits on, listening to the filaments in the light buzz above the bathroom door. This is the deep breath she takes that’s full of the cool night air and the smell of a dew-filled lawn that in the morning will probably be dotted with mushrooms. This is Chris getting sleepy, knowing that if she lies down on the picnic bench she will fall asleep, but then wake up cold and dew-covered and with her dress probably soiled by whatever wet film the rotting wooden tabletop seems to be coated with. This is Chris driving back down the highway, feeling good, feeling that this was a start in the right direction toward finding the killer or having him find her.

This is Chris imagining the killer. He has a thickly wrinkled forehead, as if the wrinkles were a flight of stairs a very small creature could climb up or down. He has eyes that are small and set wide apart. Their lashes are straight, and sometimes the top lashes stick right into the bottom lashes, or even go under his bottom eyelid, so that he has to open his eye wide and roll it to the side and insert the pad of his finger into his eye to free the top lashes. He has teeth that bits of food become easily caught in, and his breath often smells like the bits of food caught days ago in the spaces of his teeth. He has hangnails he bites off. He has sideburns as thick as Velcro. His straight hair is thick, not showing any signs of thinning even though he is approaching fifty. He is amazed by the thickness of his own hair and often puts his hand through it just to feel how much there is.

This is Chris back home in her bedroom, taking out the handgun from her pocket and putting it on the top shelf of her closet, and then taking off her clothes. Paul doesn’t wake up. This is Chris, stepping into Cleo’s room to make sure her daughter is covered, even though the night is warm. This is Chris seeing Cleo asleep with her arm stretched out to the side, and wanting to bring her arm back in close to Cleo’s side, because her arm looks as though it could be grabbed so easily if someone were to walk into her room and take her away. So as not to wake her, though, Chris just tiptoes backward outside of the room, closing the door in front of her.

I n the morning, Thomas, while slurping his cereal and reading his science magazine, tells you that amnesia is actually caused by having too many memories and the brain not knowing what to do with all of that data. So you feel better. You know why you can’t remember if you put honey in your tea or not. It’s not because you’re losing your mind, but because there’s so much going on all of the time. The dog, for example, is barking to go out and then, a second later, barking to come back in. The hummingbirds are at the feeder all taking turns sipping at the homemade nectar Thomas made of boiled sugar and water. The goose is honking and flapping her wings in the front yard, ruffled by something you can’t see, the dog, perhaps, or a low-flying hawk, or Alex up early searching for caterpillars in the milkweed as tall as she is to bring them in the house and put them in a jar. So, of course, who could remember if honey were in the tea or not with all of that taking place?

The brain can be trained. It is capable of doing much more than we think, Thomas says, reading from another article in his magazine. A child born with a weak eye can put a patch over the strong eye and train the weak eye to do what the strong eye already can. An aging person’s failing vision can be corrected by having the person sit for hours of training in a darkly lit room trying to make out blurry lines and shapes. Sounds like torture, you think, because you have become as attached to your dime-store reading glasses as you have to sidling up to your children and having them read small print for you whenever you’re confronted with it. The plasticity of the brain can be stretched by a person living in an active environment, with diversions and friends and plenty of time for exercise, Thomas reads. All of this just spells vacation to you, and you realize you are the kind of person who actually really does see the spelling of words when they’re spoken, and not just in English. Once on vacation you heard a French man, who had lost his little dog, searching all along the beach for him calling “ici,” and you kept seeing the letters spelled out as he repeated the word, so to you he was calling out “i-c-i, i-c-i, i-c-i,” over and over again.

To you, even Paul’s name is sometimes “P-a-u-l” when you think about him, which of course you have continued to do even though you’ve tried to stop thinking about him because you started to believe that the only reason he kissed you was to make you forget about him being with Bobby Chantal. Now you’re not sure what to think. You just know you’re afraid you’ll say his name when asking at the table for the ketchup to be passed, because after all, you have just learned from Thomas’s magazine that the brain is capable of anything, and you’re afraid yours will rebel. That like the strong eye covered with a patch allowing the weak eye to grow strong, if you’re constantly trying not to think of Paul, then a part of you will compensate and do it anyway. Maybe soon you will be saying his name when you want to say “soap” instead. “Pass the Paul, please,” you’re afraid of blurting out in front of your family at the dinner table instead of asking for the salt. You imagine that like some supernatural phenomenon, his name, because you are thinking of him so often, will burn through your skin and show up on your chest with smoke and the smell of your cooking flesh rising up from the burn.