Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Paul knew this was coming, but still, to hear it from Chris at that moment makes him so angry.

“I am not the fucking killer!” he yells, and of course he realizes at the moment he yells it that he yelled too loud, his voice too high, even the moonlight seems to cringe from how loud he was and seems to dim, or is it just a passing cloud in front of the moon that makes it look as though Chris’s face is darkening?

Cleo opens their door then. “What’s going on? Why’s Dad yelling?” she says. Paul steers her back to her room, to where the mobile of the planets swings and glows. “It’s nothing. I’ll tell you in the morning,” he says. “You and Mom are fighting, aren’t you?” she says. “Yes, we are having an argument,” he says. “Are you going to get a divorce?” Cleo asks as he brings the blankets up to her chin and smoothes her hair away from her forehead. He shakes his head in the dark.

O nly a few weeks have passed and it feels already like fall. Typical of New England, you think. One moment you’re complaining of the bugs and the heat, the next morning you’re waking up to a lawn covered with gold and red leaves. Even outside the facility leaves blow across the grass lawn next to the entrance. The sound of a bicyclist fitting and locking his bike into the bike rack, the metal hitting against metal, sounds sharper now than in summer, the cold somehow changing how things reach the ear. Decorative gourds on the facility’s Moroccan blue check-in deck sit in a wooden bowl.

This is you inside the facility, where you watch a man who has come from the weight room walking toward the water fountain. He walks strangely, lifting each foot high off the ground as if the soles of his sneakers are covered in gluey wads of chewed gum, or as if he were walking on Jupiter and the gravity is so high it’s a labor to lift up each foot and walk across its surface. And who knows, you think, maybe it’s possible I went to sleep on Earth and woke up on Jupiter, and everything is the same as it is on Earth when I walk outside, though there will be many moons to keep me awake at night instead of just one. You know there are sixty-seven moons of Jupiter because Thomas once read you an article about Jupiter’s moons and you were surprised that many of them have names. You had known about Europa and Io: Io is caught in a tug-of-war between Jupiter and the other moons. The tension between the two has made it very hot, and Io is the second-hottest object in the solar system; only the sun is hotter. But you had never known about all the other moons, which have beautiful names like Amalthea and Ananke. Why, you want to know, didn’t our moon get a beautiful name? Why is our moon just the moon? Why didn’t we bother giving it just one name, when we have bothered to name moons of Jupiter so far away they are invisible to the naked eye?

You jump in the water and start your workout. While you’re swimming breaststroke, you hear the susurration of the water sounding as if it were a wind that talks to you every time you put your head down and your hands out in front of you for the glide. You think you hear the water telling you to move over. You look in front of you. Why would the water tell you to move over? There is no one else swimming down your lane. There is no coach at the end of the lane telling you to move over because they need that lane for the swim team kids. Then you remember that when you walked into the pool you saw a workman hanging from the pipe in the ceiling in a safety harness. He was right above the lane you dove into. He was up high fixing an air vent whose seal had come undone. You dive under the lane line and enter the other lane, and just as you do, you hear the splash of a large metal cuff that wrapped around the air vent, holding it in place, as it comes crashing down into the water. If it had hit you, you would have been seriously hurt. After everyone asks if you are all right, you dive down to retrieve the metal cuff for the workman. Its edges are sharp and it weighs a good ten pounds. The workman didn’t even know it was about to fall. The lifeguards and the coaches keep telling you how lucky you are you decided to change lanes when you did.

On the drive home from the facility, you ask your daughters what you should call the moon. Sofia doesn’t want to join in the fun, she reads her book without looking up, but Alex wants to call the moon Fred. “Okay, agreed,” you say. “Fred, don’t be so bright tonight. Let me get some sleep at least.”

Thomas and Sofia work on algebra when you and the girls get home. While you cook dinner you hear the numbers being rattled off by Thomas as he dictates to Sofia, who writes them on a whiteboard. It has been years since you have had to think about algebra and doing equations with negative numbers. In school your teachers said you would need algebra and that it would come in handy as an adult, but algebra is never something you need to know. “Isolate the terms,” “Subtract the negative,” “A negative times a negative is a positive,” you hear Thomas saying, and then you think that maybe your teachers were right. Learning algebra is important. Learning algebra is one of life’s greatest lessons. Who else taught you such lessons?

“What you do to one side, you have to do to the other side,” Thomas says.

And such fairness! you think to yourself.

“Again, a negative times a negative is a positive,” Thomas says. And such optimism! You want to stop cooking and go over to Sofia and Thomas. You want to learn algebra all over again, but there are the onions you’re sautéing that you have to stir or else they will burn. There is the water you want to come to a boil, but you haven’t yet found the lid that fits the pot to quicken the process. There is Alex asking how do you say coins in Spanish, and you can’t remember even though you studied Spanish, and there is the dog, who is lying down in the kitchen beside you and following your every move with her eyes, asking, in her own way, to be fed her dinner of kibble soon. The goose outside is pecking at the door. Tick, tick, tick, tick, she is saying with her beak, wanting to come in because dark is falling and the coyotes might be out, and the days are shorter now, and the colder temperatures might cause a frost to fall over night.

This is the fall night, freezing the grass on the lawn, freezing the petals on the tomato plants already picked of their fruit, edging them in white, freezing the topmost surface of a bowl of water left out for the goose. This is the goose in her crate, put in for the night, her eyes closed for short periods of time, and then open again, listening for the sound of the coyote or the fox or the fisher cat. This is you awake, but with your eyes closed, thinking how Fred must not have gotten the memo. Either that or Fred just didn’t bother to heed your request, because Fred’s shining in through the windows as brightly as the sun, and you wonder if Fred, like Io, is caught in its own tug-of-war, one between itself and Earth that is causing volcanoes to form and its temperature to rise.

T his is the body of Chris. Contrary to your beliefs, she’s not perfect. This is her neck. There’s a scar there from when she went to the beach and stayed too long and got a second-degree burn from the sun. This is her right foot. There’s a callus on her pinky toe that every once in a while she shaves down with a razor blade. This is her vagina. Between her labia there’s a brown beauty mark the size of a dime. She has had to explain the dime-sized brown beauty mark to all of the four men she has slept with in her life. This is her left breast. It’s smaller than her right. This is her left earlobe. There’s an indentation in it as if she were born with her ear half-pierced. This is her right knee. There’s a scar on it from having fallen off a high-powered moped on a rocky road on a Mediterranean island. Make that three men she has slept with that she had to explain the dime-sized brown beauty mark to. One was a one-night stand and they never turned the lights on and she left his house before daybreak.