Work Text:
Even thinking about telling this story again makes my throat hurt.
It’s not so much that my voice wears out. It’s more that everything I can’t tell is like a hand tightening on my windpipe.
I lean into it, though.
At first, the cops kept asking how many bodies. I didn’t know. I was scared, I kept trying to explain. I was drunk. I was running. I didn’t count.
I remember the way the rubberized sole of my right sneaker caught on Madeline Fisher’s long hair; she was lying on the floor, not quite dead yet, and when I ran for my life, I tore out a chunk of her scalp. Her white blonde hair was in the waffled tread of my shoe, caked there with blood. I rubbed it off my shirt, as best as I could, so I wouldn’t leave tracks.
But I still don’t know how many bodies. The number goes out of my head. My shoe size is slotted in there instead.
They ask if I knew her.
Only a little, I always say. She was just another counselor. It didn’t seem to matter that the camp couldn’t find all her paperwork that first night. She seemed quiet.
Everyone likes to hear that last part. They nod.
I’m quiet now too, of course.
I wish no one knew she spared me on purpose. I wish they thought I only lived because I ran faster and fought harder and knew how to hide.
I said that to her last night, when we met out in the woods. They still have the archery field set up, even though the targets have been moldering for years. In the moonlight, their shadows are black bloodstains on the grass.
“Maybe I let you live because of those things,” she said, and laid me down in a clotted shadow.
She put the hammer beside my head, so I could turn and look at it as she moved my body gently on the lawn.
This year—the five-year anniversary of the murders, the year of wood and silverware and sapphires—I hold still while someone adjusts my lapel mic. I keep wiping my shoes on the studio carpet. I can’t seem to stop.
They wanted me back at the camp, but they’re settling for playing B-roll footage of it over my interview. I can’t go back, I told them, not even for the extra two grand they promised.
My cunt clenches when I think about it. I feel like I have grass stains up and down my back. If I open my mouth, Madeline Fisher’s hair will come out in a long, slippery braid.
Instead, I talk about how I hid in the shed. In an old equipment closet, surrounded by cobwebbed tennis rackets with broken strings. I tucked my knees up to my chin to take up as little space as I could, and I swung the door as near to closed as I could get it from the inside.
I heard her footsteps outside. And then she opened the door, I say, and then she closed it again. I don’t know why.
And my throat hurts.
Everyone knows her history better than I do, just like they know the exact body count of that summer. They’ve told it to me, but it feels like they’re clicking together bits of magnetic poetry.
Her mother. The 1950s, when it was an all-girls camp. The counselors were playing a cruel game, poking her with the long sticks they were using to toast marshmallows. One of them jabbed at her eye. She fell into the fire.
That kind of story.
I can’t even remember if she’d been born by then or not. It doesn’t seem important. The why of all of this has broken down, like those tennis rackets, and been shoved somewhere in the dark.
If it really mattered, I want to say, you’d think she’d use sticks. And fire. It would rhyme.
But she liked the hammer, so I think she just hated us. People don’t understand what it’s like when the world slides sideways, broken like an egg yolk, and all the shadows look like blood, and everyone is talking and the things they’re saying don’t matter. You want silence.
I told her where we were filming this interview. It’s a small studio. Not too many people around. I wonder if she’ll come.
(She did last night.)
When she opened the door, she got into the cabinet with me. She curled up like I was curled up, and sat beside me in the dark.
“Then you hit me with the hammer and ran away,” she said. It’s an old argument.
“Only on the leg,” I said. “And I didn’t tell anyone where I left you.”
I won’t, ever. I left myself there too, in that narrow dark coffin of a space.
In every place, now, I know where to hide and be found. There’s something nice about waiting for her, something as delicate as a silk panel of lingerie, and when the lights go out in the studio, I slip at once under the desk. It's quiet there.