Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

You read the paper in bed. There is a picture of the same trooper with the battered nose who came to the pool to talk to the coach. The picture was taken on a rainy day. The trooper is wearing a plastic covering that fits with elastic over his hat to keep it from getting wet. The trooper says that the public should not be worried. They are working hard on the case. They will find this man. You feel confident when you look at the picture of the trooper. If he is the kind of man who cares enough about his hat to cover it with plastic so it will not get wet in the rain, then you are sure he will find this killer. There is no need, you think, to have Paul get involved in the case. He’s right. It would just complicate the search. This man, this trooper with his hat encased in plastic and his strong, square shoulders, will find the killer. Even Chris, with her paintings, is helping to find the killer. The killer will surely be found.

You find yourself the next day at practice asking the water a question while you swim. Will the killer be found? You strain your ears to hear the answer, but all that you hear are swimmers splashing the water. It’s someone’s birthday, and so for fun the swimmers all sit on one side of the pool and the swimmer whose birthday it is has to swim the pool’s length while it’s being furiously kicked by thirty or so swimmers, who are churning the water so that it’s white with froth.

The next day at practice you wish you had not fallen asleep so early the night before. You wish you had moved close to Thomas and reached out for him and stroked him the way he liked, your fingertips moving in an upward motion. You wish you were not seeing Paul walk into the facility right at this moment. You think he’s smiling at you and then you realize he is actually smiling at Chris. You wish you were done with your laps already so you could stay and talk to Paul, but you have not swum yet. While swimming, and lifting your head to the side for a breath, you see Paul and Chris in the stands, sitting close to each other, watching their daughter. You see Paul put his arm around Chris while they watch Cleo, his fingers dangling close to one of her perfect breasts. You wish they did not look like such a perfect couple.

This is you at home trying on Sofia’s racing john. The suit has legs that reach to just above your knees. The children are out playing in the stream and Thomas is at the lab. You try it on in front of your dresser mirror. Since Sofia is a few inches taller than you are, and the size is bigger than what you would order for yourself, you think it might possibly fit. You want to see if it sucks in all of your fat and makes you look as thin as Chris is. You wonder if one day Paul would somehow want to see you in it. You do one leg at a time. Just getting the legs on takes you a good two minutes, now comes the rear. You tug and pull to get it up. As you’re struggling your rear gets compressed upward, and your cheeks rise up above your waist looking like two bubbles on your lower back, looking like two of those Styrofoam life preservers in the shape of an egg that mothers from your mother’s generation put on their children when they were first learning to swim. You begin to sweat all over and at once, as if you were seriously ill and had a high fever and your fever just decided to break now. For a moment you think you might rip the suit by mistake, but then you remind yourself how much the suit cost, and how the seams are ultra-reinforced, and how there is no way it could rip. You think you might faint, but you take a deep breath, exhale it slowly, and then get back to work. You tug. You pull. You extend your buttocks forward and back, a rocking motion to help slide it up and over. Pop, you think you distinctly hear when the suit finally does go over your rear. Now for the body and the straps. With the body on, you feel your chest being compressed. You wonder if this is how the women hunted in the Salem witch hunts felt when they were stoned to death. You have to suck in your breaths so deeply just to get some air down in your lungs, and you have to work so hard at exhaling. You reach down to slide the straps over one shoulder. You have to bend over to the side with your whole body to provide enough counterforce to lift up on one strap and get it over your shoulder. The strap digs in hard the entire time you’re sliding it across your skin. With just one strap on, your body is forced down on that side, and you are standing crooked, one shoulder higher than the other. You try to bring your shoulder down away from the overbearing pressure, just to relieve it. When you have the whole suit on and you can barely breathe, and your genitalia feel as though they’ve been pushed up inside you, you look at yourself in the mirror. You are a panoply of red marks and scratches. Your legs look as if the claws of a cat have raked them where you’ve dragged the bottoms of the suit up to the tops of your legs. Your arms, which you pulled the straps forcefully across, have the top layer of skin scraped off in intermittent sections. Your chest, neck, and face are all blotchy from the exertion and heat, and you still feel as though you’re going to pass out because you’re not getting enough air, but the way you look, ah, the way you look, you think. You are as thin as Chris now. Your breasts, which you once thought were too big, are now pleasantly rounded and squashed behind the black polyester fiber. Your rear sits tight and high. And most of all, you feel faster, even though you’re just standing in a room. No wonder all the girls like these suits. You feel that if you dove into water and kept going, you’d go down as fast as a bullet. Then, if you touched pool bottom and turned around for the resurfacing, you’d shoot straight upward, coming up a few feet out of the water like a great white after it’s grabbed its prey. You think of taking a picture of yourself. If you can’t believe it’s you standing there looking so thin and firm, then nobody else will either. What stops you is the location of the camera, all the way downstairs and in a hard-cased bag on the floor by the door, where you left it the last time you came back from a shoot. You’re scared to bend down. Just bending over slightly you feel as if your organs are rolling one on top of the other and you’re cutting off some blood and other necessary fluids from your tissues. You think how you might just buy a girdle, not a girdle like old ladies wore when you were a girl, but the new kind of girdles, the girlie girdles that all the brides you photograph are wearing these days, the girdles called body shapers that come in styles like corsets and bodysuits and waist shapers and are made of comfortable spandex guaranteed to firm what you’ve got and add cleavage to what you haven’t got. You feel younger, it’s true, and even though it takes you almost as long to get the suit off — your top layer of skin gets even more damaged and your rear swears it will never take the suit off and protests and protests and fights back every time it hears you grunt and groan to work the fabric off your hips — you love yourself in the suit. Paul would love me in that suit, you think. Once it’s off, you put it back in Sofia’s closet, where she dutifully hangs it up after each meet. It still has the shape of your rear inside it, and it’s damp from all of the sweat you lost in your bathing suit battle. You avoid looking at your body free of its suit in the mirror. You don’t want to see how badly your muffin top is drooping toward the floor. If you don’t look in the mirror, then maybe you can keep the image in your mind of how you looked when you were in the suit. You can keep that image in your mind when you speak to Paul next, and you can feel okay about feeling sexy when he talks to you, because you know that anytime you want to, anytime you have, say, an hour free, you can squeeze yourself back into Sofia’s suit, and you will fit the bill. You will really be that sexy.