Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

“I read your identification in your wallet,” the killer says. He recites your name, your address. He recites your driver’s license number, which you haven’t even memorized yourself, but it sounds right, as if he has memorized it. He throws your purse at you, and it hits you in the chest. You did not think your purse was so heavy. You did not think there was that much in there that could cause so much pain. Does your hairbrush with your hair and your daughters’ hair in it really weigh so much? Does your ChapStick you never use weigh that much? Do your coins? And suddenly you remember how to say coins in Spanish, monedas, and you wonder why you couldn’t remember that before when you were helping Alex with her homework and she asked you what the word meant. How is it that you remember this word when a killer is standing over you holding a long-bladed knife, and his arms, up and down, are covered in scratch marks, and your leg is throbbing and your mouth is so dry? Is this another thing to write and tell these writers of thrillers about, that even when you are faced with possibly losing life, with the lives of your family being lost, you remember stupid things you could not remember before? Monedas sounds heavier than coins, and now you are not surprised that for a moment you cannot breathe when your purse is thrown at your chest. All the monedas in Spain seems to have been thrown at your ribcage at once. The killer turns and leaves. He is not going to kill you. You will live. He is off to kill someone else. Someone young. You are too old to be killed. What good fortune, you think. But it is not something you want to tell others. I was spared because of wrinkles like rakes beside my eyes, and loose skin at my neck. You hear Chris’s car drive off, and when it’s gone you look up. A thin sliver of a moon in the shape of a curved sewing needle hangs up there, providing a bit of light, though not really enough to see much more than the leaves, which no longer appear warm red and gold, as they did under the beam of the flashlight, but look frosted, as if suddenly the temperature’s dropped and everything’s become white and crisp to the touch. You feel inside your purse, but your phone is not there. You do not have a way of letting anyone else know where you are. You think about what Thomas told you, that there is a zoo in Miami that uses iPads so that orangutans can order food by pointing at their choices on a screen. They have all the intelligence they need to speak, but their vocal cords aren’t developed like ours. And here you are, you think, a human in the woods without your old-model flip phone to call for help. You use your vocal cords, but your voice just gets thrown around like a loser in a wrestling match landing hard on a gym mat. You can hear the wind take your scream and slam it back down when another crosscurrent of wind intersects it, and your cries for help end up by your feet.

You start walking toward where you think the road is. At least there you won’t get as lost as you would deeper in between the pines and maples and bushes with thorns that embed themselves in your pants and continue to prick you long after you’ve left the place where they’ve grown up in tangles and thickets. You think how you will probably never remember where this spot off the road in the woods is, and how if you were in the woods by your house, or anywhere else, it would seem like the same woods. You would never be able to bring anyone back here to show them the blood that dripped from your leg and onto the leaf-covered ground. You would never be able to show them where the killer stood over you and threatened to kill your teenage daughter if you turned him in. Only the woods can talk for you now. The tree you leaned up against remembers the feel of the warmth of your back on its deeply lined bark. The sapling you grabbed onto so you wouldn’t fall as the killer pushed you forward on your wounded leg remembers your weak grasp. Only those things know, and like the orangutan without the right vocal cords, they really can’t speak.

The moon lights up the flat expanse of the road more brightly than the woods. You feel something shore up against your leg in the wind and reach down to find a page of Paul’s story. The killer must have thrown it out the window before he left, unimpressed by the metaphors, the inexact images, the turn the writing took at the end. You can hear more pages fluttering around you, but you only keep this one page, because it happens to be the first page, and so much possibility lies in the first page when the final pages aren’t there to end it. Bobby Chantal, for example, could still be alive. And you could end up not being here on this dark road, walking for what seems like forever, wishing you had never met Paul or Chris, wishing your bad leg would just remove itself from your hip and try walking on its own, because it’s slowing you down. You don’t look forward to not telling the story of the killer you cannot identify because he knows about your teenage daughter.

This is the tree in the woods cooling off after you lean up against it. This is the wind taking the warmth and sending it over the deer sleeping in a small valley on tall grass bent by their bodies now bedded down. These are the other pages of Paul’s story mixing with leaves, acting like leaves, blowing up in currents, sailing down and wafting side to side. This is rain coming days later, dropping on the printed words, magnifying briefly the B for blood Paul wrote when describing the first moments he found Bobby Chantal with her throat slit.

This is more rain, sopping the page, and this is even harder rain, able to tear the paper because of its force. This is the paper, not even as hardy as the thin fallen leaves it’s mixed with, crumbling, losing its whiteness, and becoming unrecognizable after the season’s first snow.

T his is days later when you open the paper and see the picture of your killer standing in front of a fence at a school where sheep are penned to keep down the growth of poison ivy. He is not wearing the polo shirt and khakis. He is wearing blue jeans and a button-up-the-front shirt. He is smiling, and so for a moment you’re not sure if it’s really him, but then you notice the unmistakable wrinkles on his forehead that are so deep and look like steps you could actually climb. The newspaper headline reads, “Even School Secretary Pitches In to Stop the Itch,” and the article describes how faculty, staff, and students alike all take turns on weekdays and weekends watering the sheep named Cindy, Happy, and Iris, who eat the hardy poison weed with gusto in addition to occasional flakes of hay. Under the killer’s picture is his name, Floyd Arneson. This is the other headline on the same page of the newspaper: “College Student Mindy Reynolds Missing for Five Days Straight — Last Seen at a Gas Station on I-91 on Her Way to Her Parent’s Home for a Visit.” This is the picture of Mindy Reynolds smiling, holding up her fingers in a peace sign to whoever is behind the camera.

This is Thomas walking toward you with a cup of tea while you’re reading the article, and this is you quickly folding the paper over so he can’t see. This is the fireplace door being opened and you stuffing the paper inside, watching the smoke rise, and this is Thomas telling you to sit and have your tea before it gets cold. This is Thomas taking the cup from you when you’re done and telling you to go upstairs and sleep. You look tired, and your leg, which you told him was pierced by a stick when you took a nasty fall in the woods, will never heal. This is your dream where the killer comes to your house and starts asking for your teenage daughter, and this is you screaming in your sleep for the killer to get out, and this is Thomas coming into the room smelling like chainsaw oil, shaking your shoulder, telling you it’s okay, it’s just a dream. This is Sofia at the dinner table, feeling your mother eyes all over her, feeling you staring at the way she brings the fork to her mouth and lifts her head back to drink from a glass. “Mom, what?” Sofia says, and you lower your eyes and say, “Your hair looks so pretty. The chlorine must be giving it highlights.” And this is Sofia ignoring your remark and then complaining about how she ages up and has her birthday right before age group championships this year, and she’ll never make the new cut times, and why couldn’t you have had her a week later? she asks, and you answer, “You were premature. You were the one who wanted to come out early,” you say, and your daughter says, “Right, it’s always my fault.” “No, it was probably mine. I did too much that day. I washed the windows in the house. I took too long a walk with the dog. It wasn’t your fault.”