Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

These are your fingers, sore at the ends from trying to pull up the competitive swim-team suit over Sofia’s body when you first arrived at the facility and you stood in the stall in the bathroom. This is you, dialing Thomas, who you think by now has left his work at the lab and gone home. This is you telling him you have arrived at the meet, telling him you guess you are lucky, you don’t have to time, and Thomas tells you he has been home already an hour and split wood, and that he has seen a fox come up close to the chickens. Already you have lost the duck and the rooster and a few hens to a fox.

This is the fox, down in the woods that are not so thick, but the maples grow thin, and the pines only reach up to the waist, and the sun has a clear path to hit strong and full on the fox’s cinnamon-colored back. This is you telling Thomas that the girls here on the other swim teams look like Amazons, and that you are afraid for your girls, who are just of average weight and height, and the youngest, maybe not even average yet, maybe below average. This is the fox moving his ears from side to side, listening to Thomas’s deep voice as Thomas stands out on the porch talking to you, smelling on Thomas the chainsaw oil that dripped on the knees of his pants. This is one of the Amazon girls diving into the water, going down, so far down, on her dive, as if she is too heavy to control it, and then she comes up, breaches, is what you think, and you’re glad one of your children is not next to you, because if she were, you might say “breaches” out loud, and then your child would say, “Oh, Mom, how could you say that? You’re not supposed to say things like that.” Your children have been schooled in schools where guidance counselors give weekly lessons on bullying. Bullying is not what bullying was when I was a kid, you think. When you were a kid bullies were kids who threw another kid against the chain-link fence at recess and took the lunch money out of his pockets. Today, bullying is calling another kid a name, and bullies are kids who simply don’t want to play with another kid because they don’t like them. You know because Alex, your younger daughter, recently came home from school with a note saying her actions that day were considered bullying, because she and another girl openly agreed they did not want to play with another girl. The girls were overheard by a teacher. You felt then that you were only seeing a mere 1 percent of the universe. You reprimanded your daughter, and explained how that wasn’t nice, but then later that night, talking to Thomas, you told him you needed clarification. Since when did all this become bullying? you asked. Thomas shook his head while reading his science magazine. You thought he was shaking his head with you, telling you he didn’t know either when all of the rules changed, when what we could see in the universe started shrinking, but then he said, “Listen to this,” but you didn’t. You left the room. Some of his words, though, chased you down the stairs. You made out the words “quarks” and “particles” and “gluons.” Your house is like one big ventriloquist. There are open parts everywhere, so that you often don’t really know where a voice is coming from. You’d think a person was talking to you from the bathroom, when they were really in the rec room, or in the girls’ loft. His words chased you downstairs, and seemed to get louder as you entered the kitchen, even though he hadn’t moved from the bed. You had no idea what he was talking about and doubted that if you had read the article yourself you’d understand it any better.

You remembered to take a vitamin, and then felt guilty remembering, because you hadn’t remembered earlier to give your children their vitamins, and they were the ones who needed them the most. All the growing of the bones, the laying down of the platelets, and your older girl, Sofia, who recently started her period, she would need more iron now, you thought. You thought of the other things she might need, things not for purchase, but intangible things like compliments, and feeling the eyes of others on her, noticing how she looks good in a dress. She might need you and Thomas to tell her how pretty she is, how strands in her hair in the summer sun look gold. You once had these things yourself, these compliments, and maybe it was not so long ago, but now they are gone, and you think maybe that is not so bad, because in a way it’s as if you have given them to your daughter. They are hers now. You wonder what it was that your father once gave to your brother when he was a teenager, or was that the problem, he gave nothing to your brother at all, and your brother walked through his teenage years without this kind of passed-on gift from your father. Your brother did not take on the posture of a man who was proud. His shoulders stayed rounded. His eyes darted in conversation rather than frankly holding someone’s gaze. His voice, even, still broke, rather than taking on a mellow, basslike tone.

This is the killer, our killer, at the meet watching Kim. He holds a heat sheet that he bought for three dollars from a parent sitting at a desk at the entrance to the bleachers. On the heat sheet he can see that her fastest time for her hundred fly was 1:08.74. He watches Kim behind the blocks. She is not like the other girls. She does not turn around and high-five other swimmers. She does not wave to someone who may be watching her from the stands. She stares straight out while waiting for her race, and she jogs in place and loosens up her arms, not seeming to look at anyone, not even when she hears her name being called by her teammates, who cheer her on before she gets ready for her dive. When she’s on the blocks, she easily bends the top half of her body over and holds on tight to the edge of the block, so tight our killer is surprised that when she dives in the platform of the block doesn’t come off in her hands and end up with her in the water. He watches how she moves, how her slender neck reaches up and out with every upswing of her arms. He wonders if today will be the day she beats her record, because that is what he is waiting for. He is confident she will do it soon. No one else focuses as hard as she does before her race. On her last lap, though, it is obvious this isn’t the day. She seems to tire, either that or the other girls swimming with her get a burst of energy. She ends up touching the wall with a 1:09.75. She has gained time. When she gets out of the water she does not even go up to her coach for a bit of advice. Instead she goes right into the warm-down lane, her head sunk low between her shoulders. The killer sighs. He was looking forward to the way the blade of his knife would cut through that throat, sending all of that red blood that would be pulsing so hard from her athlete’s strong heart down her shirtfront. (He couldn’t understand why that strangler out west bothered to strangle. What a waste of an experience, not seeing the blood, not letting the blood do what it most wants to do — flow.) Especially, though, he was looking forward to how she would look, all of the excitement and satisfaction and energy in her eyes from having beat her record suddenly leaving, suddenly his for the taking.

S itting in the bleachers, trying not to turn around and yell at the parent sitting behind you who yelled at you in the first place, you imagine the sounds of the air conditioner that was in the house you rented on vacation at the equator almost a year ago. You close your eyes and imagine also the calm blue light that would come on the control panel of the air conditioner when it was turned on. You think how you loved that trip. Thomas surfed with you then. He wasn’t thinking about his failing lab on the trip. You would see him riding a wave and then falling over backward when he had ridden the wave as far as he could, landing in the water with a yelp and a hoot at having had such a good ride. He walked with you on the beach at night, then stopped and held your arm. He was smiling, amazed, holding out a flashlight into the shrub-covered dunes, where hundreds of orange and purple crabs crawled, their movement sounding like pattering drops of unceasing rain. But now, since you’ve been back, and the problems at his lab haven’t disappeared, the bacteria still aren’t growing, the planes by his office at the airport are stilling screeching on the tarmac out his window, he hasn’t reached out for you once, and what does it take, you think, to make him reach out to you again? This is when you hear, “Hello, Annie.” It’s Chris, with the perfect breasts and rear. “Hey, have a seat,” you say. You then proceed to move your purse and your book to make room for her. Chris has no bags with her, not even a purse, as usual. Because you have known her a few years now you know most of her clothes. She is wearing her faded blue Levi’s jeans rolled up to the ankles, tennis shoes, and a white V-neck tee shirt. Her hair is kept back with a simple black ponytail holder, and she wears no makeup. You think she is the most beautiful woman at the meet today, and then you turn around and look at all the other women in the bleachers and think you are right. Chris always smells faintly of mint, not like toothpaste mint or breath-freshener mint, but like the real mint, the kind that grows wild in your field by your house. Whenever you take a walk to the stream through the fields, you break a leaf off and pinch it and smell it.