by Mark Morris
That is when the gunshot cracks. Herb startles back and nearly trips over the mower, burning his calf against the exhaust. A chunk of asphalt dislodges from the street, and the cat leaps and goes running again.
Herb holds out his arms and says, “No, no, no,” and rushes toward the source of the gunfire, toward the heavy old woman in the floral-patterned nightie with the pink bathrobe flapping around her. One foot wears a slipper; the other foot is bare. No makeup. No dentures. Her hair sleep-mussed, white filaments floating behind her. She is the picture of vulnerability. Except for the rifle she carries.
This is Mrs Flanders. Over the past few years most of the neighbourhood has turned over to younger families, but she and her husband have been living here since the sixties. Now she is trying, with some difficulty, to eject the casing of the round fired and load another bullet.
She manages to blast off another shot—once again missing, the cat now dodging off into a hedgerow.
And then Herb intercepts her, wrestling the rifle away. She barely seems to recognize he is there. She is determined to kill the cat, continuing her pursuit of it. And when Herb holds her back, she lets out a desperate, keening wail.
A sound that ten minutes later warps into the noise of an ambulance. The vehicle comes to a jerking stop outside a small blue house with a hydrangea bush skirting the porch.
The front door is open. Like a gaping shadowed mouth. Mrs Flanders’s other bedroom slipper lies on the stoop, abandoned there.
When the EMTs hump into the house, hefting their equipment, they move uncertainly through the shadowed interior. Past a living room with a box TV and an afghan thrown over a La-Z-Boy recliner. Past a hallway staggered with family photos in wooden frames. To the bedroom.
In the doorway they pause. They don’t say anything. Because they don’t need to. The siren—wailing, wailing— speaks for them.
They don’t notice the crocheted pillows and beige drapes and porcelain figurines. Their eyes are on the bed. Here lies an old man, Mr Flanders. His body has been rent and bent in so many unnatural angles that he seems like a puzzle pulled apart and fitted together incorrectly. One of his legs has been hurled against the wall, leaving behind a sunburst of blood.
Everyone on Cutler Street is standing on their flowered porches or on the swept sidewalks or on their deep-green lawns, holding up their hands to shade their eyes from the sun, calling out to each other, “Do you know what’s going on?” Their faces wrinkle in confusion. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen here.
Everyone except for Sadie. She has finally found her kitty, her stray, her little Pumpkin. The cat lounges in a sunbeam in the living room, flicking her tail and purring, and Sadie curls up beside her and licks her thumb and cleans off a stain of blood on her muzzle and says, “Did you find a mouse? I bet there are lots of mices here. I bet you’ll like it here. Yes, you will. You’re the best thing that ever happened to this boring old neighbourhood.”
LETTERS FROM ELODIE
Laura Mauro
I went home with Sean the night Elodie died. I remember glancing in her direction as we turned to leave; she was dancing barefoot in the incoming tide, and the pebbles were bright with moonlight, her legs glistening. The beautiful Swedish boys were singing and clapping a rhythm and she danced for them. Her smile was luminous. I’d never liked men but I went home with Sean anyway, because I was angry, and because I was lonely, and because he’d slept with Elodie a few times before and by my bitter, drunken logic it was the closest I would ever come to being with her.
I remember the way she moved, loose-limbed, keeping time not to the rhythm of their clapping but to the beat in her head; Elodie had always been out of sync with the rest of the world. There was laughter on her lips as they sang to her, bliss in her half-closed eyes. The Swedish boys were tall, white-gold, like angels. She caught my eye as I turned to leave, paused a moment—arms held high above her head as though in rapturous sky worship—and her mouth formed two silent words: Bye, Ruth.
The next morning, I woke alone, and she was dead.
* * *
I met Elodie on New Year’s Eve, at the house party of an artist friend whose opulent basement flat looked out onto Palmeira Square. Elodie sat alone in the courtyard garden as the clock struck midnight, chain-smoking rollups. She had blunt-bobbed hair, like a silent movie star; she wore a dove-grey silk dress, her legs bare, face pink with cold. I thought she was ridiculous. I thought she was beautiful. I brought her a flute of champagne and offered her my coat and she smiled. We shared rollups stained scarlet with the imprint of her lipstick and when morning came—red sun rising sluggish over the rooftops—I walked her home just to be with her for a little longer. We walked slowly along the seafront, her shoes dangling from her fingers, the sharp salt air scouring my smoke-heavy lungs clean. She knew all the homeless people by name, and wished them all a happy New Year. “I’ve been homeless more than once,” she told me, though she’d known me only a few hours. She used to say that if no one person could claim to know her better than the rest of the world, then nobody could ever own her.
She always was full of shit.
Her flat was a top-floor conversion on a shabby street near Hove station, the kind of place artists and loners lived; the kind of place people died alone, surrounded by empty vodka bottles and the black-scorched bowls of misused spoons. She didn’t ask me in for coffee, and I didn’t ask for her number. I thought I’d never see her again. I hoped that I would.
* * *
The next time I saw her she was a face in the crowd, dancing to the beat of a local indie band while I worked the bar. The band were regulars, and their fan base was small and loyal. I was sure I’d never seen her there before, but she knew all the words, whooped for joy when they announced her favourite song. She was breathless when she came to me at last, black hair plastered to her face with sweat. She smiled, greeted me with warmth, and even though her voice was half-swallowed by the din my name had never sounded sweeter in anyone else’s mouth.
She was one of the stragglers who stayed behind as the band packed up. It seemed that everyone knew her, that I had been stumbling around Brighton all these years oblivious to her influence. She sipped black rum through a straw and told me about herself. She was so bright, so effervescent that I felt shabby in comparison, embarrassed by the mundanity of my life. She frequently broke off mid-conversation to introduce me to her friends. Everyone was Elodie’s friend. She invited people into her life with such ease and yet, for those few hours, bathed in the spotlight of her attention, it seemed that I was the most important person in her world.
Elodie talked about herself like her entire life was a story in the midst of unfolding, and it ought to have sounded terribly pretentious but she was magnetic: she’d hitchhiked solo across Australia, lived on a boat in Amsterdam with a trio of sex workers who barely spoke English. She’d taken acid on a beach in Greece and seen the face of God in the water. She delivered this last anecdote with such sincerity that the incredulous laughter never made it past my lips. Her dark cat-eyes were trained intently on mine as though she could share her experience telepathically. As though she could show me God.
“What did He look like?” I asked, half-joking.
She smelled like cigarettes and sweat and rum. Her lips were silk against my ear.
“Everything,” she whispered.
* * *
They found Elodie’s body washed up on the beach. The Swedish boys had been the last people to see her alive. They’d parted ways with her at two in the morning. She’d seemed happy, they said. They had alibis, all of them. The only thing they’d done wrong was to leave her alone that night, but stupidity wasn’t a criminal offence. They could have saved her. They would carry that mistake with them for the rest of their lives.
Her pockets had been full of stones, the police said. She’d walked out into the water, under the pier, where nobody would see her in the dark. There had been no drugs in her blood, no alcohol. No signs of a stru
ggle. The pieces came together: Elodie had walked into the sea, and Elodie had drowned.
I didn’t believe any of it.
Her parents must have come to collect her body, though there was no word of a funeral. Elodie spoke about her parents sometimes, but they seemed distant, and faintly sketched, as though they were purely hypothetical. She’d said they’d disapproved of her decision to stay in Brighton, where—they had opined—we would drag her down. We, the “druggies and dropouts and perverts”, who gathered on the beach six nights after her death to celebrate her short, vibrant life, who shed tears at the cruelty of it all; we, her legion of friends and acquaintances and ex-lovers, who built a bonfire and told stories of her: how special she had been, how rare and bright a jewel. It was bullshit. A grotesque pantomime in which Elodie, even in death, was the star. It was exactly what she would have wanted.
“It doesn’t feel like she’s gone,” Sean said, as we hunched side by side next to the dying fire and shared a cigarette. I trusted Sean as I trusted few other men; he and I operated under the unspoken agreement that what happened between us on the night of Elodie’s death was a one-off, and I knew his sudden appearance was not by virtue of scouting for exploitable weakness. “Sometimes I wonder if she was ever really there. You know? Like she was a dream we all had. She never felt real.”
I turned to Sean. He hadn’t shaved since Elodie’s death. His eyes were cow-large and sad. I chewed the inside of my cheek until the taste of iron flooded across my tongue.
“She was, though,” I said. Of all the lies I might have told, it was a lesser transgression. I could sense by the loosening of his shoulders that he was grateful for it. He lit another cigarette, and said nothing more.
I walked away from the fire, away from everyone else, bitter-mouthed and nauseous with stories of her. I stared out at the sea that had stolen her from me, and I pictured her: water spilling from between bruise-dark lips, eyes wide and sightless; skin blue-marbled, hair wet and glossy against her face like black blood. Exquisite dead girl, long-limbed and balletic on her mortuary slab. My beautiful narcissist. I’d known her more intimately than any of her lovers. I knew that she would never have chosen to die so quietly, so secretly, her pockets full of stones. I wondered why she’d put them there. Why she’d walked out into the water that night and let herself drown.
* * *
She rejected me gently, the way I imagine she’d rejected countless others. She explained that I met every single one of her criteria. I was as perfect a partner as she might hope for except for one very significant thing.
“I’m not gay,” she said, apologetic, as though what I kept between my legs was the sole obstacle to a great and profound love affair. I did not know what her criteria were. In all the time I loved her, I could never pare down her extensive list of partners to a common set of characteristics. The only hard and fast rule, it seemed, was that a cunt was a deal-breaker.
I burned with shame. I should have read her better. She was unselfconscious; she held herself with the easy confidence of one who has never learned to be ashamed, who has never had to repress and hide away. She was dressed as David Bowie that night. Another party, another performance. Bare skin beneath her jumpsuit. A beautiful boy under black light, a handsome girl in the glow of the streetlamps. And in the dark, a black-eyed angel; a long-limbed, perfect creature for whom binary notions of sex seemed quaint and inadequate. Strange, that someone so straight should wear queer so well.
“But I hope we can still be friends,” she added, and the smile in her eyes was so sweet; the promise in there of some nebulous closeness that I knew in my heart would amount to Elodie’s emotional table scraps, but I was so hungry, so desperate. She kissed me on the cheek, wound an arm around my shoulders. “You’re very special to me, Ruth,” she murmured, though we had barely known one another six months. Her warm, soft body felt like heaven. I greedily drank up her affection and despised myself for every last drop.
* * *
I walked along the beach towards the bright lights and noisy chaos of the Palace Pier, where life had not stopped for Elodie. Against the gathering dark the pier shone gold, a gaudy ersatz sun. She’d always hated that pier, though she herself had only lived in Brighton for a few years, scarcely enough time to consider herself rooted. She hated the noise of it, the quaint seaside tackiness—bingo halls and funfairs and sticks of rock, a monument to an era which, she contended, ought to have died out with the new millennium. She used to say that Brighton was for artists and outcasts, and it didn’t seem to matter to her that she was neither of those things because she was so good at pretending to be; so good that even when she was dead, people talked about the “free spirit” she had been, as though there’d been any truth in it at all.
She played the part well. She would commit to no one, to nothing. Plan would supersede hazy, unrealised plan as though they had only ever been suggestions: I’ll move to New Zealand. I’ll learn sign language. I’ll open up my own bar. She flitted between jobs, subsisted off borrowed money, which she solemnly promised she would pay back someday. It was an adventure, she used to say, to never know, to be at the mercy of the future. Nobody else could make meandering through near-poverty sound quite so romantic.
Cold water engulfed my shoes, a sudden shock. I’d wandered off towards the incoming tide. Above me, the pier stretched out, consuming the sky. The sea lapped at my ankles. Alone in that empty, liminal space, waves hissing like blood in my ears, I heard a voice calling out from the darkness.
* * *
She’d leave me voicemails. She knew I had an aversion to talking on the phone, even to her. She knew I would switch my phone to “silent” overnight because I valued my sleep far more than I valued human interaction. Elodie was a forest fire, burning through men, consuming hearts and leaving them in ashes, but it was never about love, or sex. She was Narcissus, and she beheld her own reflection in the eyes of her lovers.
I called them her “letters”, as though it were an intimate correspondence, something we had both consented to. I told her I threw them away, “unread”. She smiled at the metaphor, at my compliance, and we never spoke of it again. She knew I was lying, but that was okay. I was so good at keeping her secrets.
More often than not, she’d be drunk when she called. The persona she had so carefully put together would lie tattered, her crisp accent slurred; all the things she hated, all the people who had disappointed her. All the lies she had told. With each letter I pieced her together until she was no longer a patchwork of wild stories and daydreams and wispy, far-off ambitions but something else entirely. Something sadder, smaller. Threadbare at the edges and bitter at the core. Still vibrant; she could be no other way.
I’d lie alone in the dark at 3 am listening to her messages over and over, revelling in her vulnerability. I’d run her entrails gently through my fingers, press my tongue against her raw, exposed skin. I’d savour the anger and loneliness in her voice, feel a warm thrill in my heart at every barely suppressed sob. She disgusted me. I adored her. She would not love me, but she gave herself to me all the same. I held the truth of her in the palm of my hand. At any moment I might have exposed her, shown all her acolytes what they were really worshipping. She gave me the means to destroy her and trusted that I would never do it. That’s all love is, when you strip it down to the bare bones. A loaded gun to the temple with someone else’s finger on the trigger.
* * *
The salt stung my nostrils, the rich smell of wet decay. Thick moss grew where the struts met the water, damp and glossy. The space beneath the pier stretched out before me like a long, lightless corridor, framed on either side by deepening dusk. She was out there, beneath the water. I heard her whispering in the dark, though she couldn’t have been; her lungs had been reservoirs, her mouth filled with sand. And yet it was her voice, her cadence. I’d listened to her messages enough times that I remembered entire monologues by heart, could quote her the way other people quoted beloved films.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and laid it on the shingle. Peeled off my shoes and placed them beside it. The pebbles were cold, wet with brine. She’d filled her pockets with stones. Walked out into the water. She’d died alone. She’d died without telling me.
The sea swallowed my ankles, tugging at the hems of my jeans. I walked into the incoming tide, and though the sharp chill gnawed at my skin, my bones, I felt the rhythm of her words like a pulse. Like sonar, rising to meet me as I turned to face the empty beach, sinking back into the sea. Cold water rushed to embrace me. I let it take my weight, cradling my skull, gentle as a lover. Filling my mouth and ears so that I might taste her, so that I might hear her. Her words carried on the current as clear and as eerie as whale song. Her voice in the water. Elodie’s last letter.
* * *
Eight days before she died Elodie and I went to a club, because a band she loved was playing, and because she didn’t want to go alone. I stood at the bar and watched her dance, though I hated the music: lo-fi indie bullshit, guitars scrawling out derivative riffs, narcoleptic vocals. I watched her pick her victim. He was tall and pretty, like they always were: long blond hair, a sick-skinny boy in tight jeans and pristine white T-shirt. She smiled like a sunrise, radiant. She leaned up and whispered in his ear, pressing her body just so against his so that there could be no ambiguity, but her coy smile was a play to his ego. She liked to let them believe they were in control.
I downed vodka tonics until the dancers began to blend into one another, an amorphous mass of arms and blissed-out faces moving ceaselessly. I drank until I couldn’t see Elodie anymore and so it didn’t matter when she disappeared, inevitably, her prize in tow. Always his place; nobody was allowed inside her flat, not even in the name of conquest. I drank until I could barely string a thought together so I wouldn’t picture them, so that the images (skin against skin, limbs sinuous, his eyes pale and glassy and her face, there, in the black of his pupils) would be lost in a sea of drunken non sequiturs. So that they couldn’t hurt me.