Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

You swim anyway. The cool water wakes you up. You are always tired as you drive to the pool. You yawn huge yawns, one after the other, that make your eyes close up because your jaw is stretching so wide and you’re afraid your yawning will affect your view of the road. But when you’re actually swimming you’re always impressed that yawning is the farthest thing from your mind. You look down at the silt at the bottom and wonder why everything you see you interpret like a Rorschach, why the silt looks like scarves to you and why your daughter’s menstrual blood on a pad looks like an hourglass and why even the grain of the wood in your bedroom walls looks like a smiling face, and clouds, oh my god, you have seen more shapes of animals in clouds than you’ve seen on the sides of the roads while driving, more cottontail rabbits up in the air than you’ve ever seen in a summer field, more whales and dolphins than you’ve ever seen in your life, and more horses rearing, their manes flying behind them, than you’ve ever seen before on the many farms you drive by every day on your way to practice. Even in people’s faces you have seen things — the shape of the lines around Thomas’s mouth look like the hats the Japanese wore while working in the rice fields long ago, and in your own face you have seen scars on your forehead from cuts you received as a child, and it looks as if someone created a scene of a rural landscape on your forehead. Slightly wavy lines representing the lay of the rolling land, and other stray marks representing random birds in flight.

You even see things in things you haven’t seen. For example, your brother’s blood pooling on the carpeted floor was, in your mind, in the shape of a head of cauliflower.

You hear the water soothing you, telling you it’s okay. Shush. There now, the water says. There, there.

You sit on the topmost bleacher after your swim and lean back against the wall. You were practicing your fly in the water, trying to get more glide in your stroke and also trying to bring up your arms faster instead of letting them drag behind you and slow you down, but you don’t think it worked at all. Your fly was as slow as ever, and did not resemble at all the fly the swim-team girls do where they look like sea serpents moving through the water. You see your daughter Sofia sitting against the wall of the facility. You wonder if she’s tired. You tell yourself to remember to feed her a better snack before practice next time. You’ve heard of the other swimmers eating bananas before practice and even yams because they keep you going for so long. Yams. When was the last time you even bought a yam? You see Thomas in the facility. He has come with you and he has used the treadmill and the weights and now he is walking to the water fountain, holding his fingertips to the inside of his wrist. He likes to check his pulse when he feels his heart flutter strangely or skip a beat. You think that whenever you feel your heart trip and stumble, you don’t want to stop what you’re doing to see if it will pass. Instead you keep doing what you’re doing, even if sometimes that’s swimming. You think dying will probably hurt as much as the time you and Thomas were stacking the woodpile and he threw a log on top of your thumb by mistake. You wanted to puke, it hurt so badly, but you lived through it. After your fingernail turned the purple color of the inside of a mussel’s shell and fell off, you got out your pink nail polish and painted all your fingernails pink, as well as the skin on the thumb where your nail used to be. If anyone noticed the bumpy coat of polish on your thumb that looked as if a child had painted it for you, they didn’t say so. You admire how people can be so polite sometimes, not even mentioning if there’s food hanging off your lip, or if your underwear is showing above the waistline of your pants in the back.

You want to get back to reading Anna Karenina. Karenin is thinking of divorcing her, and he’s demanding she hand over the love letters that Vronsky wrote to her. It’s taking you forever to finish the book, months even. You’ve only been able to concentrate long enough to read a few pages a night, and Thomas keeps interrupting you. Thomas tells you about nicotine, how years ago people drank it. He wants to create a new alcoholic beverage, one that has caffeine in it as well as nicotine. Think how it would sell! he says. You, of course, think how bad the drink would be for people’s health, but then you start thinking there may be a profit in it. You think of all the people you see in your town who smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and drink alcohol and you are sure they would try the beverage, and just as soon as you start imagining the possibilities, the people you know who could help promote the product (Larry, the liquor distributor, for example, whose daughter is on the swim team and who often has his daughter help stack the displays of bottles in the grocery stores after hours), and the fortune to be made, Thomas tells you it’s probably not possible, what with all the tobacco regulations the government has, and the control the tobacco companies have over their own product, you probably couldn’t do it. You, deflated, look out the window on the drive back from practice and listen to the conversation of Sofia and Alex in the backseat. They are talking about cheaters. Swimmers in their lanes who don’t do the full workout. Swimmers who when the coach isn’t looking don’t bother to kick when they’re on a kick set, or who don’t bother touching the wall to complete the set, and turn around early, going back down the lane, or who say they did the whole set, but end early, or who reach a hand out and grab on to the lane line, giving themselves a little extra propulsion. Thomas tells your girls how those cheaters will suffer come race day. Come race day they won’t be as fit as the others, and it will show in their times. You can’t hide poor training, he says. What’s worse is not bothering to study, say on a math test, he says. What’s the point of even taking the test if you haven’t bothered to learn the material? And you see Alex in the backseat shrink down, and you wonder if Alex is one of those swim-team cheaters or not, or maybe she hasn’t shrunk down in her seat at all for feeling guilty, but has merely shrunk down in her seat because she’s tired, because she has swum her heart out for the past two hours and every fiber of her adolescent muscles is saying I’m tired, and feed me. How did I expect them, you think, to be satisfied with just one apple a piece on the ride home? I should have brought granola bars and bananas too. You reach out behind you in the car to touch one of your daughter’s hands, to more than pat it, to hold it up in your own hand and squeeze it, to somehow parlay some energy back into her. If only I had the energy to give, you think, and then you feel a warmth course through your body, and as if on cue, your body seems to have found the extra reserves to share with your daughter, the endless supply of mother energy that all mothers have, even when their children are full-grown.

S ome of the time Mr. Floyd Arneson, aka the killer, likes to show up at work on time, and sometimes he shows up early, but he never shows up late, because he does not want to have to be called into the principal’s office. This is Floyd Arneson thinking, I know perfectly well there is a pretty blond woman who is trying to bait me into killing her. I can see the outline of the handgun sitting in her oversized pocket. She is careless, though, and turns her back to the woods too often, where I could come out quickly and be on her in no time. Floyd Arneson likes thinking about this woman rather than having to think about work. He is so often annoyed with the teachers when they want to order supplies and say they need them right away and need him to type up a purchase order for them right away and then, when he orders them right away, even cutting his lunchtime short to get it done, the package arrives and they leave it in their mailboxes for days. So it was no hurry, really, at all. He is tired of the way they come into his office without knocking, while he is working, asking for substitution forms to fill out, asking where the principal is, or asking how to work the new phone system, which they should have learned by now since he has put a copy of the manual in each one of their mailboxes. He is tired of the way they open up his desk drawer while he is out, searching for postage stamps or scissors or tape or pens when, of course, if they weren’t so lazy, they could just go down to the supply room and get most of those items themselves.