For Those

Late it was in the day, quite at twilight, with Venus visible in the west, when they found me drowned. Two dived into the long lake quite in a quickened panic and pulled me up onto the lichen-smeared rocks. There I lay as if looking at the sky but my eyes were sightlessly open. By my bloat they knew (I know for the commented) I had been down drowned for near two days. Two twilit fishermen stood over my corpse of a woman dressed in cut-off jeans and a heavy checked jacket over a white translucent t-shirt and an opaque bra and socks and one shoe. They walked away to go to the road, to phone the police they agreed. They got into a small car and drove away and once again I was at peace with lapping waves and all sorts of insects who knew a good thing when they saw it. They landed on me or they crawled on me, licking, tasting, and eating my soft deterioration; they barely made way for a chipmunk and a fox who from a hundred yards raised their noses in my direction ten minutes before. The chipmunk bit away at my left hand while the fox at my feet would have tickled my toes if only there had been sensations to be had.

I'd shown him, and now he'd have to pay. Off upstream the lake was the cottage I'd dashed from with a histrionic shriek two nights before, a shriek that said: I'll show you about going jumping in a lake. The moon had been fingernail when I splashed down and swam heavily in my shorts and his jacket. I cried I'm going to die I'm going to die to no-one but myself as I swam blindly exhaustingly away from shore making fresh water salty and bitter to glug. If I'd looked back I'm sure I would have heard him calling Come back Come back rather than him saying again Go jump in the lake, bitch. My head was swum with wine when my arms and legs lagged at last and heard nothing from anything outside my reach. Now he'd have to pay. I went numb, and tired, and down and up and down and down and almost up. I heard the blood pump when up went down, and it seems I couldn't breathe anymore and my heart went ritardando, slowly, then quickly slowly.

I was laying down on my back on a table so stainlessly steeled it was but the low-paid work of a custodian to hose meaningless fluids off of any six in the morning. I was infantilely naked and I'd been cut down the middle, from my grey throat between my grey breasts across my grey guts to my grey groin, and pulled open. My lungs had been removed and they were being weighed in a metal pan. Perhaps they were calculating their densities, I don't know. A number got coldly uttered and a pen went to a form to record. I'd been routinized and routed and rounded and there I had the name one had when standing in line at an amusement park being counted by a carny to the capacity of the next roller coaster car. A knife went into me and there was the sound of rare roast beef as arteries and veins were quickly cut from my heart and then lo it was in their hands to be weighed and assessed. There: my heart was in a pan for pounds and ounces. If I'd had eyes to see, which I did not have any longer, I would not have been able to see my heart as it got flopped lazily in its pan, a cold wet fish pulled from its depths.

It had been a rough tough year, for both of us, but he naturally must have thought, or so it appeared to judge by his behaviour, he had gotten the worst of it, which was demonstrably false, since deaths had happened in both our families during that tough year. That being so the case, given his selfishness, he must have naturally thought that this week at a cottage was his and his alone, to dispose of at his will, to waste aways with books and beer and puzzles and gin and games and wine; meaning I could and should be shut out, along with the rest of the world; and so after a day of being ignored I gave him a taste of his own medicine for dinner. My opening gambit was to reply coldly and briefly, pointedly too, to any observation of the long lake spread like a carpet near the table. He finally clued in, the dolt, and I laid my charges, and he got all defensive, and I returned fire, he threw down his fork, got up, and went for more beer. Infuriations continued apace, back and forth for hours and hours ... till silence.

I am in the grave now, and I have been here for a very long time indeed. I have been able to sense the passage of time, and I have counted and counted, using as a measure the amount of time between when I was pulled from the lake to when I was chopped up in the autopsy. I have sensed those durations, and I have counted, now to 372,862, which means something like ten thousand years have passed. Five hundred or so years ago there was a cataclysm of some kind, and an earthquake. I got dropped, all my bones and teeth and hair, into a cave beneath the cemetery, along with a thousand of my kind. I am in water once again. It's like I'm swimming again, deep in the dark cold water, drifting to and fro, weightlessly, my skull sliding with the tide from some body, the bones of my hands rolling with the waves. I am thinking of him all the time, hoping, knowing, taking comfort, that wherever he is he is being punished‑I know it‑for the terrible thing he did to me.

But, remember I remember the morning of the day I died. I'd gone off early to get us a newspaper from the newspaper box up near the road. I made some rich coffee and that's when he woke up. We sat down on the Muskoka chairs in our porch and drank our coffee. He looked like he and his auburn curls belonged there in the nature of the place, like water rushed by land. In the newspaper it was all a bunch of useless politics that could not compete with the sight of the loon that showed up on the lake, settling down for whatever reason loons do before our eyes. We looked at the loon for a while, passing the spy-glasses back and forth, till somehow we lost interest for a couple moments. The loon went away when we weren't looking, never to be seen, at least by me, again. He stood up, glasses in hand, and scanned the lake. He said: "I think she's gone." He sat down again and dropped the glasses down onto the window sill. "Maybe she'll come back." I said: "Maybe tomorrow morning. You think?"