The woman, in my head I named her Mora, for the sycamore tree, was the first I’d seen naked. Mora’s were the first breasts, the first swatch of hair between the legs, the first bullet hole.
Gloria couldn’t look at her. Jenny couldn’t stop.
Rudy swore in a whisper and leaned into me. ‘What do we do?’
But I didn’t have an answer.
‘Who do you think she is?’ Jenny said but nobody wanted to guess.
‘We should tell Sheriff Samuels,’ Gloria said and I heard a tremor in her voice. Usually so steady, her tone, rich like knocking on oak, shook at the sight of death. Rudy was quiet, a deep frown clouding his eyes, as if were he to concentrate hard enough, he would bring a storm rolling across the cornfields.
‘Not yet,’ I said. It was a terrible secret, I realised. One that could change everything, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run home, to Momma. She’d know how to handle it, what to say, she always knew best, but I was rooted. Momma wouldn’t be home this time on a Friday night and, besides, how could I explain it?
Jenny stepped closer, looked at Mora as if she’d come upon a rat snake taking in the neighbour’s dog. The serpent’s jaw dislocating and reshaping itself so unnaturally. Something that small ingesting something far too big, you can’t help but watch, a jumble of curiosity, revulsion, an urge to help surpassed by a want to know if it would succeed in its swallowing. I’d never seen that expression on Jenny’s face before. Something happened to her that day. Changed her from the girl who would lazily kick her feet in the river, breathing in the sun and scent of evening primrose, to a girl who couldn’t sit still, as if she had electricity running through her, twitching her muscles, itching beneath her skin.
‘Why’s she naked?’ Jenny asked.
‘Maybe she was swimming,’ Rudy said.
‘Swimming and then got shot,’ I said.
Maybe they didn’t see the bullet hole. Maybe they thought it was something else, something innocent, and this poor woman had simply drowned while taking relief from the sun. Maybe it was and I saw a gunshot where really there was a hole made by a branch after she was already dead.
I bent down and lifted a lock of hair from Mora’s face. Everything about her was grey. Her hair, between my fingers, was wet and coarse, grainy with silt. It didn’t have the softness of living hair, it hung wrong, it looked wrong. She was deflated, absent of rushing blood and air. It was human as I’ve never seen human.
‘Johnny,’ my sister’s voice, a frantic beat. ‘Johnny, look.’
The dead woman’s chest moved.
I yelped, stumbled backward, hit my elbow on a rock. Gloria gasped and Rudy swore and Jenny’s eyes widened.
A spike of fear pressed against my stomach. Same place on my gut as the hole in hers.
‘She’s alive, she’s alive, oh God oh God, do something,’ Gloria said, tugging on Rudy’s arm, backing away.
Mora’s chest rose then fell in a strange breath. Her eyes didn’t open. Her hands didn’t move.
‘We have to tell someone,’ Rudy almost shouted. ‘We have to get help.’
Her chest rose again but lower, not high beneath the rib cage. A bulge formed at the top of her abdomen, it shifted, squirmed. The breath was not a breath.
I pressed my back against the fallen tree, scrambled up.
‘Jenny, get back,’ I said.
But she’d bent over, put her face inches closer to the movement.
A shape formed in Mora’s skin, defining itself against the weight of her flesh like an arm stretching out beneath a heavy blanket. My pulse echoed in my ears and chest, drowned out everything but the soft squelching sound of the body. Nobody moved. Gloria still clutched at Rudy’s arm and he at hers. Jenny still stared, bent slightly at the waist, her top lip hooked up in pleasured disgust. I backed up, moss and bark flakes sticking to the sweat on my t-shirt, resisting the urge to grab Jenny and run.
The pink edging the inside of the hole in Mora’s stomach pushed and turned outward, a black something appeared. Wet and shining, it forced itself free, a thin sinuous tube. I felt sick, I wanted to hurl up my breakfast, my lunch, those few biscuits I’d eaten after class, I wanted to be empty. My head told me it was an eel or catfish, my eyes said demon, devil, alien.
Jenny backed away as the creature wriggled free of the hole and flopped, writhing and slick, on Mora’s stomach.
‘Kill it! Kill it!’ Gloria screamed.
‘Quiet,’ I said, harder than I should have. She was so loud, so shrill, I feared her call would bring parents and police down on us and we’d have to explain all this.
The eel spasmed and jerked and fell into the leaf litter inches from my feet. I jumped onto the log, Rudy and Gloria cried out, ran halfway to the Fort, Jenny shuffled backward but she was slow. The eel flicked itself, landed on her bare foot. She shrieked as if stung, the spell of the body broken, and kicked out.
I lunged for her, pulled her close to me, wrapped my arms around her shoulders. The eel landed far from the water, then as if sensing its distance, increased its convulsion.
We all looked to Rudy but he was up on a tree stump, squealing worse than Jenny.
The eel flicked toward us and Jenny and Gloria screamed afresh.
‘Kill it!’ they yelled.
Do something, Johnny boy, get your head together and goddamn do something.
I grabbed a stick, hooked it beneath the eel’s body and flicked it in a long, squirming arch into Big Lake.
A breath. A beat. A splash.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Rudy said, finally climbing down from his perch.
I looked at him, big brave Rudy Buchanan, shaking like a sissy with a spider on his hand. Rudy would take down a bully in a single punch but he was quaking in his shorts at a fish? I tried not to laugh.
‘It’s just an eel. What are you so afraid of?’
He glared at me. ‘It came out of a dead body.’
‘Johnny, come on,’ Jenny said. ‘We should be getting home.’
We shouldn’t. We didn’t have a curfew and Momma wouldn’t be wringing her hands for us. But when I looked around at my friends, my sister, I saw them all shaken. In truth, I was shaken too but one of us had to keep it together or we’d all be screaming on tree stumps.
I’d gotten rid of the eel but the body, the girl, she lay where we’d dragged her and all humour drained from my mind. It changed the day. Turned the blazing sun cold. Jenny’s face showed raw confusion at what we’d found, what it meant. I saw the same in Rudy’s eyes, in Gloria’s. Hooked lips and frowns.
I usually had the answers but today, I was as lost as them.
The four of us left the Fort in shuffling silence. We emerged from the trees and the sticky evening heat pressed against us. I suddenly missed the cool, sheltered air of the Roost but couldn’t face going back down there. Not now, maybe not ever.
‘We have to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said. ‘They have to find out who she is and who did that to her.’
‘Cops won’t do anything,’ Rudy said. ‘There’s all sorts going on in this town they don’t know about. Shit, if they did, Samuels would have a heart attack.’
Gloria scowled at him. ‘I think a murder is a little more important than your dad’s chop shop.’
Rudy sneered and mimicked her voice. Gloria punched him in the arm.
‘What