Driftwood. A piece of driftwood up against the boat. The boy sticks his oar back into the water to push it aside, but it doesn’t budge. His face becomes hot and red as he stabs at it, sweat running down his temple and onto his glasses, the lenses blurring.
“It’s stuck,” he whines, thrusting the oar behind him. His older brother takes it from him and leans over the side of the boat, the shifting of his weight causing the vessel to tip closer to the water’s edge. The water is calm and lapping against the mass, which is wrapped in weeds and wedged halfway under the boat. He pushes the oar as hard as he can and the pile gives and severs into two, both halves unhinging from the boat.
“It’s…it’s not…” he stutters, but his throat is tightening and he falls back into the boat, dropping the oar into the open blue water. The boy’s eyes bulge and he starts to scream, causing a flock of geese that were drifting nearby to startle into the orange sky.
She never takes her eyes off of them as she floats away, unaware her legs are going into the opposite direction, and she never stops grinning, the flesh of her lips ripped away to reveal a skeleton’s smile. Her arms, cheeks, and stomach are swollen to twice their normal size, the skin tight, a muddy black and jaundice yellow, and she’s bloated with putrid gas and juices. Her entrails begin to bubble and spill out of her and into the water, turning the blue a murky maroon. Behind her back, her hands are withered white and forever bound in wire, as are her feet that are just a few feet away. The boy faints and falls into his brother’s arms, unconscious, and his brother sits alone in the silence, watching her long black hair mimic the waves like seaweed as it melts into the rhythm of the coming night.
***
There were a lot of moments when she didn’t know where she was going. Her father often found her wandering in the woods by the remains of their old home, stumbling through the cracked bodies of the leaves and the barren trees. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t leave that place alone. She couldn’t just forget the heat, the flames that licked up the sides of the rooms, engulfed the furniture and family photos, the flames that crawled up her mother’s body. By the time she got there, her mother was having an episode, convulsing on the floor in the flames. She could still remember how the heat ripped through her clothes and skin as she waded into the inferno, the black air filling her lungs as she screamed at her mother to wake up, and then feeling her father’s arms around her waist, pulling her away. The firemen came and went and the house didn’t make it and neither did her mother. The ashes they received were only a guess; it was her mother and the house mixed into one, the place she had loved so much finally becoming a part of her at last.
When they found the presence of an accelerant at the scene, they held them in her hospital room for questioning. She laid in her bed on the pristine white sheets as they spoke to her father and her, the smell of antiseptic and rubbing alcohol making her nauseous, bandages covering her arms and legs but doing nothing for the pain. The burning was so much deeper than that, somewhere down in her bones where no one could ever get to.
Her mother was recently prone to seizures due to a blood clot they’d found in her brain and she often forgot to take her medicine, without her father’s constant reminders. She also had a habit of leaving candles lit around the house, since she loved the sweet smells of vanilla and pine so much. The investigators questioned everyone they knew: neighbors, teachers, local shop owners, even her own boyfriend. But they didn’t find anything, so it had to be an accident. When they closed her mother’s case, she wondered how you could ever blame the dead for being dead.
***
They started going back to church and not just on Sundays. The priest always greeted them with a troubled smile when he saw them and when he shook her father’s hand he held onto it; he seemed to hold it tighter and tighter each time after confessional. During services, father and daughter would sit side by side in the very back, holding hands and praying for her mother. She prayed that her mother would never burn again like she did over and over in her memory. She prayed that her mother would never feel the heat of those flames or the coming of another unstoppable seizure while she was in heaven. She prayed for herself and her family, and she thought her father prayed for the same.
***
When enough time had passed, she dumped the can of ash into the lake, watching as the waves engulfed and mixed with what was only now a memory of her mother. She couldn’t see the ash as the flesh and body that she used to love, the arms that used to hold her at night when she had nightmares or the hand that would caress her face from her brow to her chin when she cried. It wasn’t her mother anymore, just a burned-up memory of her. She laid a hand on her stomach, feeling her emotions bump and swirl. She had to move on, if not for herself, then for someone who wasn’t here just yet. She had to think of the future, of a life that would be without her mother. Her eyes began to sting and she turned into her father’s awaiting embrace. They stood in silence for a while, listening to the lapping of the waves on the sand.
“It’s alright, sugarplum. I know how much you miss her,” her father said and she nodded into his shoulder, her chest tightening from the tears. Could she remember her face forever? Her voice? There was so much left unsaid between them, she still had so many questions to ask her.
“I just wish… I could see her one last time. I want to see her,” she said, her voice shaky. She wanted to see her in more than just her own nightmares. She looked up into her father’s warm brown eyes and they were filling with tears too. He must have felt the same as she did.
“I know honey. I know.”
He looked out at the great horizon of the dark blue lake and his eyes narrowed, seeing something she couldn’t see. Her eyes followed his and together they watched the orange sun slowly dip into the lake, sinking.
***
They tried to start hunting again, something they did a lot before her mother burned. She thought it didn’t seem safe, but her father insisted he needed to show his daughter something important. They walked side by side in the woods, shivering in the cold, guns strapped to their backs. After a while, her father grabbed her shoulder and stopped her.
“Look there,” he whispered and pointed ahead.
A doe crept through the brush, her children not far behind. She looked into the doe’s eyes and the doe looked back, spotting her and freezing in place. The doe sniffed at the air between them, and looked her up and down, exploring her scent. She recognized the doe’s calmness and curiosity as her own; she could still faintly remember a time she lived that way too. Exploring the unknown instead of running from it. But to be curious and calm in the woods wasn’t how anything survived, really. It’s how things often died. Her father slipped the rifle from her hands into his and fired a single shot, and the doe moaned and fell into the cracking dry leaves. A scattering in the brush a few feet away were the sounds of her fawns escaping into the rhythm of the early morning.
She gasped, not realizing she’d been holding her breath and looked at her father. His cheeks were pink from the cold and his mouth was set in a frown.
“You didn’t take the shot,” he said, standing up and walking away from her to the doe. She stood, shaking, and followed him. They knelt by the mother and each labored exhale made puffs of smoke into the air from her nose. The doe kept opening and closing her eyes, looking up at them. She wondered if it was praying for mercy.
“Why couldn’t we wait for a buck, daddy?” she whispered. He was running his hands through the doe’s fur, his gloves discarded into the leaves beside them. His fingers trailed an imaginary line from her mouth to her stomach, and then he rubbed circles in the fur of her back.
“She had a limp, didn’t you see it?” he said, moving his hands to her left leg twitching in the brush. The knee was rubbed raw and bleeding, an old injury that had turned infected. His eyes traced the wound as he took out his knife.
“I’m helping her fawns, bringing forth the inevitable. When something’s broken, there’s not much you can do to fix it,” he said. He leaned towards her and took her hand in his, then brought it to the doe’s stomach. She felt something so small and gentle, something she’d felt inside her so many times before; a single movement against her palm. She began to cry, her tears falling into the fur.
“She couldn’t have taken care of it. It’s better this way, honey. Do you understand now?” he asked, rubbing her hand with his thumb. She pulled her hand away and stumbled back, away from him, the leaves crunching under her boots. He brought his knife back into view and she turned and ran into the woods, holding onto passing trees to steady her as she began to hyperventilate. In the distance, the doe moaned a long, terrible moan.
***
“Please, for the love of God, please don’t do this!” she sobbed, her spit spraying the night air and snot dripping down her chin. The rain hammered down around them, covering up her voice and her footprints in the mud. He tightened the wire on her wrists and she cried out in pain as the barbs cut into her bruised skin. With a single kick to the back of her bound legs she fell to the ground, cracking her head against the hard rock. She blacked out for a moment, then when she resurfaced, he took out his serrated carving knife. She’d seen him use it before; serrated knives are best for cutting into animal flesh. The blade unzips the skin in a fine line and then drags nicely against the meat into the second cut. She screamed and the tears came back, but he didn’t tell her to stop crying. He didn’t even tell her to be quiet. Instead, he took off his glove and gently touched her trembling face from her brow to her chin, and her breathing was ragged against his hand. His brown eyes shined in the black and blue night and he drove the blade into her plump stomach, pulling it across her body in hitches. She began to choke on her own blood, but he didn’t even give her the chance to gasp, swiftly rolling her through the dirt and into the black water.
Her coat pockets and boots started to fill with the heavy mud-laced water, her eyes, mouth, and ears being rushed with its poison. Her heart was beating in her ears and her lungs were pushing against her ribs, shuddering, holding onto that last breath of air.
The last image she saw was his face, the tired father who wasn’t one anymore, looking down at her as she sank into the darkness.
Down there, at the bottom of the lake, she saw herself as a decaying skeleton, a body swaying with the cattails and the pondweed and the algae, and the tiny fish that would take shortcuts through her skull to catch a current. She looked up at the waves above and she saw flames. One by fire, two by water. Soon the rain stopped and so did the bubbles rolling up, up off her tongue, billowing to the surface above.
Black, black, the water, the sky, the air in her lungs…
Sarah DeLena, Honorable Mention, Collin Anderson Memorial Award in Fiction
Sarah DeLena is currently studying English and Professional Writing at SUNY Cortland. She hopes to become an editor for YA literature, her favorite genre, own at least two golden retrievers, and further the legacy of the oxford comma.
The Collin Anderson Memorial Awards in Creative Writing are open to SUNY Cortland students. The awards are sponsored and judged by the College Writing Committee.