Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

The killer scratches the inside of his arm. He scratches it hard. His nails make red raised lines up and down his skin.

He sees you looking at him scratching. “Did you know sheep eat poison ivy?” he asks. You don’t answer this either. You think he is the lion talking to you now. He is talking about something so strange it is not anything you can begin to understand. You try to move your leg a little, just to see how badly it hurts when you do. You suck in your breath. There is as much pain as before, but it’s not worse. You think you might be able to walk on it, but you would not be able to run.

Your phone rings. It is probably Chris or the police. Chris has told them about you being driven away, stolen in her car. What would you say to Chris anyway if the killer did let you pick up the phone? Hi, I’m somewhere on a dirt road miles into the woods. I’ll give you a reference point — a thousand trees blowing in the wind. I’m fine, except I’m bleeding all over your seat. I’m fine, and by the way, your husband’s story isn’t that good. The killer says he’s glad you didn’t answer that because he didn’t think you wanted the tip of his knife in your other leg as well. You think he is beginning to sound more like a killer now. That is something you think a killer might say. You try to think of books and movies in which someone was in the same position as you are. You try to remember how they escaped, but nothing comes to mind. All you can think of is how your brother escaped by putting a gun in his mouth. You don’t even have a gun to grab from the killer and turn on yourself. If you tried to grab his knife, the tip would land in your other knee and you would not be free, you would be miles from free, as far away from free as you are far away from another person out here in the thick woods where the tree limbs creak and the wind whooshes around the frame of the car.

Y ou can’t believe you are hungry. Aren’t you supposed to feel nauseous instead? Locked in a car with a throat-slasher? Bleeding? It must be nerves emptying acid into your stomach and making you think you are hungry. Where does it say in those books and movies that the victim felt hungry while they were in grave danger? You’d like to complain. Letters should be sent to writers of thrillers everywhere. You never mention hunger, the letters should say. You are wrong. You haven’t done your research. You yourselves haven’t let yourself be victims so that you know exactly what’s going on inside the head of one. Go out and be victims, the letter would say. Real ones, you’d add. The killer shakes his head. “What’s the matter?” you say.

“You’re too old,” he says, and he stops the car. You’ve been feeling this way anyway, lately. Your daughter keeps laughing, telling you that you are on the doorstep of fifty. You wonder what that doorstep looks like. Is it a large sheet of granite like the doorstep to your home that continually has green splats of goose poop on it from the goose who likes to stand on the granite and peck at your glass door, wanting in? The flesh around your face has been feeling looser. You were hoping while kissing Paul the last time that he didn’t notice. You think you even tried to think of kissing “firmly” last time, so that he would not notice. You used to tell yourself that your hair, with its gray, sometimes made you look blond in certain light or from a distance, but now it really looks as gray as a sad cloudy day, as bleak as crows calling in a fallow field on a sad cloudy day, as miserable as cold rain beginning to fall on that sad cloudy day in that fallow field with the crows wheeling overhead, calling their faraway call that reaches into your heart and splays it open.

Too old for what? you think to ask, but don’t. There’s no point in hearing an answer you wouldn’t understand. He answers you anyway, even though you never voiced the question. “For killing you. When I kill people too old, they are more ready for it and the energy doesn’t come out from their eyes.” You don’t say anything. You hold your breath. If he isn’t going to kill you, then what is he going to do with you? Is he telling you to get out of the car on your own? That now is your chance? You begin to reach for the door handle, and think maybe when you try to open it he will press the button that unlocks it.

You are so amazed when he does unlock it that for a second you don’t pull the handle to open the door. You look at him out of the corner of your eye. He is scratching both his arms again. He is shaking his head. You get out of the car. You step out on the side of the road onto fallen pine needles. You start heading down the road. The road, of course, must lead to somewhere. You will come to a house. You will come to a bigger road. Your leg with the wound wants to stay behind. Your leg with the wound wants to stay seated in the car without weight on it and without the cold wind touching it. Your leg with the wound doesn’t care about the killer seated in the car with you. Your leg could stand that killer a little longer. You grab your leg from behind, lifting up on it to help it take the steps it needs to take in order for you to get away. Up ahead, it is so dark that you imagine you could walk off the road and into the forest and not even know it.

Then the sound you are dreading to hear you hear. It is the killer opening the car door. It is the killer’s footsteps coming up behind you. You imagine he is going to grab you from behind and kill you here, instead of in the car, where it would be too hard to extract your body once you were dead. You start to run, of course, but your leg, the one that would rather be sitting back in the car, doesn’t let you run. You hobble forward. You scream for help. You can hear your voice getting carried off by the wind, traveling behind you. He catches up to you and grabs you by the arm. “This way,” he says, and he pushes you into the forest holding a flashlight in front of him, lighting up the fallen red and gold leaves. He puts you up against a tree. “Sit down,” he says.

Great, it’s about time, your wounded leg says. Your other leg, your good leg, could kick your wounded leg for being so stupid.

“You must be about fifty,” he says, pointing the flashlight in your face. “Do you have daughters? Is one a teenager?” The face of your oldest girl flashes before your eyes. You see her long hair and her perfect eyebrows and her pointy elbows that seem to jut out all the time. “Is she?” he says. He kicks your wounded leg now with the heel of his shoe. You scream, and roll forward, then you nod. It is your bad leg making you nod, not wanting the pain to happen again. “If you tell anyone what happened, or what I look like, I will find your daughter. I will cut her throat,” he says. You think about your brother. His death was enough. Enough, enough, you want to say. This many members of my family can’t kill themselves or be killed. There has to be a limit, you want to say. Isn’t there some kind of limit? Isn’t one tragic death per lifetime enough? Oh, no, you think. you can’t kill her. She doesn’t want to die. And realizing this you are relieved. You know now that Sofia, despite her sagging shoulders, despite her hair hanging in front of her face, is not like your brother at all. She wants to live. You see it in how she fights to regain her speed in that last twenty-five of her one-hundred free, how her shoulders power through the water, how she slowly, steadily gains on the field as if she imagines her former slow self is there in another lane and she will beat it. You make a deal, with God of course, because the killer is an animal and won’t listen anyway. You tell God you’ll remember to compliment Sofia from now on. You won’t make the same mistake your father did with your brother. You’ll stop yourself from saying, “Fix your hair,” or “Keep your back straight,” and instead you’ll say things like, “Your first twenty-five was so fast!” “That swimsuit looks good on you!” “You got an A in English? That’s terrific.” Just let her live, you think. Deal?